


& Other Prohibited Activities

by phonecallfromgod



Category: Alex Stern - Leigh Bardugo, The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Gen, M/M, Mild Gore, Multi, Ninth House Fusion, Occult, POV Multiple, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 08:35:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 46,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27847802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phonecallfromgod/pseuds/phonecallfromgod
Summary: On the brink of expulsion for exposing the Harvard Final Clubs as more than just elite fraternities, Mark Zuckerberg is offered a second chance to save his own skin (and maybe win back his best friend in the process).However, taking on a position in Lethe House, the organization responsible for monitoring the occult activities of the Final Clubs isn't exactly a walk in the park. Least of all when his mentor hates his guts, the club members have a vendetta, and Eduardo won't even talk to him.But Mark isn't the only member of Lethe that excels at breaking the rules, and he soon finds that everyone has secrets they'd rather stay hidden.
Relationships: Divya Narendra & Mark Zuckerberg & Erica Albright, Divya Narendra/Cameron Winklevoss, Eduardo Saverin/Mark Zuckerberg
Comments: 25
Kudos: 26





	1. Part I: The Virgil

**Author's Note:**

> No knowledge of Ninth House is required for the enjoyment of this fic (at least according to my betas) and it also contains no spoilers, but if you are coming from the Ninth House side, a working knowledge of TSN is definitely a prerequisite.

_Dealing with club members — including alumni and punches — is an area where Lethe officers need to display an abundance of tact and diplomacy. Maintaining positive bonds with club members ensures a smoother and more civil experience for all parties, but it is of the utmost importance that Lethe officers always keep these bonds professional. As such, inappropriate relations between club members and Lethe officers are strictly prohibited._

_—from, **A Crimson River: Procedures of Lethe at Harvard and Beyond**_

_If you’re going to fuck someone from a club, don’t._

_If you’re too stupid to follow that rule, at least make sure it’s not someone from the Porc._

_Best not to play around with those who know what you’re going to do before you do it._

_—from, **Lethe Diary of Lawrence Summers, Oculus, Class of 1982.** _

_**Part I:** The Virgil_

Everyone remembers where they were the night the Facebook dropped. 

Or, more specifically, anyone who was _on_ the Facebook remembers the night the Facebook dropped. 

It had been a dreary rainy night in April and Divya had been lying in Cameron Winklevoss’s bed trying to will himself to get up and go home, Cameron already having fallen into a light sleep beside him, eyelashes fanned over his cheeks in a way that should not have been making Divya’s attempts to leave so hard. 

It had been a relief in a fucked up way when Divya had gotten the text, first from Erica with a panicked link attached, and quickly followed by an influx from his different Final Club contacts. 

“Fuck,” Divya said, sitting up too quickly, Cameron jolting awake beside him. 

“What’s wrong?” Cameron asked, reaching out for him, Divya pulling away sharply and telling himself it was just about the need to react quickly. 

“Some sophomore fucker just hacked and leaked every single Final Club member.” Divya scrambled together his discarded clothes off the floor and started pulling his jeans on like they’d done something to personally offend him.

Cameron’s eyes had gone very wide and very serious. “What do we do?” 

“ _I_ need to go to work,” Divya said carefully, looking at the buttons on his shirt instead of Cameron. “Wait until the Porc reaches out, you’re not technically supposed to know about this. And I’m sure they’ll want to do their own troubleshooting.” 

The rain hammered on the windows and Divya was not looking forward to the cold wet walk into trouble he had ahead of him. 

“Everything will be fine,” Divya continued. “Probably just some stupid bitter washout punch, lots of firework, lots of paperwork, no real threat.” He doesn’t really believe it, and from the look of it Cam didn’t either, but there was a script he needed to follow as the Dante right now, as a representative of Lethe, even when he was in Cameron Winklevoss’s dorm room for uncompromised reasons. 

“Div…” Cameron said, a hand stretching out like he wanted to touch Divya but couldn’t bring himself to bridge the gap. 

“Everything will be fine,” Divya said again, now fully dressed, Cam still naked under the tellingly crumpled sheet. He looked unconvinced, which was fair, so Divya leaned over, pulling Cameron’s face between his hands and kissed him as sweet and calmingly as he could muster in the moment, which was not fair at all. He tapped at Cam’s temple gently. “Stay put in there okay?” 

“I— alright,” Cameron said, sounding a bit dazed, Divya slipping out of the dorm without another word, already ringing through to Erica for the update. 

In the end he’d been on the right track about the bitter pledge, though Mark Zuckerberg had never been punched, at least not of the club variety. Divya was pretty sure he wouldn’t be first in line to give Zuckerberg a good smack, even months after the Facebook disaster which had dragged out into an endless bureaucratic nightmare for Lethe. Ironically the speed at which they had pulled the website down and tracked it down to Zuckerberg seemed to have whipped the Alumni Boards into a froth rather than calming them down, everyone having braced for a months-long witch hunt after word got out that the clubs were compromised. Which meant a lot of Divya having to field irate Old Boys on top of rendezvousing with Summers about what they were doing on the record about Zuckerberg. Though the long and short of it was that he _was_ going to be expelled as soon as they could figure out exactly how he’d done it. 

They might not call them Secret Societies at Harvard but that didn’t mean they didn’t keep things just as close to the chest. The Traditionalists, the six clubs that presented themselves as all-male were especially rattled to have found their (usually fewer but still existing) female members’ names and faces plastered up amongst the rest. Though thankfully, through what Divya could only assume had been a lot of string pulling, this fact had never been dwelled on in any of the news coverage about the Facebook. 

He didn’t have to sit through any of the academic hearings, thank god, but Summers asked him to stay put for the summer (not a big deal, he was already planning to anyways), and to add one Eduardo Saverin of the Phoenix SK Club to his list of Persons of Interest. Divya didn’t know the exact details, and he didn’t care, but it was fairly clear that his name had come up in Zuckerberg’s expulsion hearings. 

He made a note reminding himself to bring Eduardo Saverin in for questioning as soon as he was back for Fall Semester, and had let himself exhale as spring turned to summer and the Alumni Boards started to settle down and stop hounding him. Zuckerberg’s expulsion hearings were going to be done any day now, and maybe once they were Divya could give Cameron a call. They had an unspoken agreement that whatever _thing_ they had between them was a fairweather arrangement only. Hooking up with a member of a Final Club, especially one with Cameron Winklevoss’s very unique skills, was already a horrifically irresponsible choice at the best of times, neither of them were about to rock the boat during the swirling storm Zuckerberg had dropped them all in the middle of. 

Still, the threat had been contained, and Divya was just waiting for the all-clear, already having mostly switched his focus to the Facebook debacle and setting his gaze ahead at the task of having to pick his own Dante in the coming months. It was a daunting task reporting to no one but himself for the first time since he’d joined Lethe, but Divya felt at least semi-reassured by this as well. Relying on other people had never been his strong suit (“Understatement of the century,” Erica would have argued), but if he was going to have to start relying on someone to fill his shoes, he’d sleep a lot easier knowing it was at least someone he’d wanted to fill them. 

And then Summers called and said with no fanfare, “We’ve found your Dante.” 

Divya had blinked once, twice, remembered that he was on the phone and pulled his voice back up from where it had sunk into the floor. “I’m sorry, sir?” 

“Mark Zuckerberg is going to be your new Dante,” Summers said. 

“Is this a fucking joke?” Divya said before he could think better of it. Though, actually, even if he could think better of it he’d probably have still said something to that effect. 

“No it is not a _fucking_ joke, Mr. Narendra, and I would ask you to please conduct yourself as a gentleman of Lethe, good lord.” 

“Mark Zuckerberg is currently in the process of being expelled from Harvard,” Divya pointed out. 

“Not anymore,” Summers said. “Now, we will have lots of time to figure out these details over the summer, but— ” 

“Sir, you cannot _possibly_ be serious. He jeopardized the safety of all eight organizations and every single person in them— !” 

“He can see through the veil.” 

Divya’s swirling thoughts slammed against the inside of his skull like a crash safety demonstration. “What?” 

“Mark Zuckerberg, lord knows how or why, can see through the veil.To some degree. We’re still figuring out the exact specifics but — in light of this information he will not be expelled from Harvard and as the Lethe administrative liaison— ” 

“Sir— ” 

“ —in conjunction with the Lethe board it is within our power to assign a Dante on behalf of a Virgil in an extraordinary circumstance. I think you can agree this is an extraordinary circumstance, can you not?” 

“But sir— ” 

Summers sighed. “I’m not happy about this either, Mr. Narendra, but our job is not to be happy, our job is to keep things in balance. We are the shepherds after all. I will be dispatching Mr. Zuckerberg into your care at the beginning of the fall semester, and I trust you will uphold your duties to this house, your post, and this university.” 

Divya hung up on Summers before he had the chance to, and then, in a moment of blind righteous indignation, he called Cameron. Of the two it was really hard to say which was a worse decision. 

“You’re late,” Divya says, as the hunched figure of Mark Zuckerberg finally walks into the bike room at the Porcellian. 

“I know,” Mark says, and offers no other apology or explanation. Which is annoying but not unexpected, and Divya just swallows his annoyance and ushers him up the stairs to the second floor. 

“Please tell me you at least did all the preparation I left you,” Divya says following Mark up the stairs. Virgil might have lead Dante into hell, but Divya doesn’t trust Mark enough to turn his back on him up the Porcellian staircase. 

Mark scoffs. “Yes. Obviously. Doesn’t sound that different from what the Phoenix does, only less gross.” 

Despite absolutely losing his own lunch the first time Divya had witnessed a Phoenix Prognostication, he couldn’t help but be pleased that Mark had had an obviously worse time between the guts, vomit, and having to see his still very pissed former best friend up close and personal. 

Though while the Phoenix is objectively the grossest ritual, Divya personally finds the Porcellian more stressful. Temporal magic is, well, temperamental, as is anything involving astral projection. They’ve had more catastrophic casualties in the last decade than any other organization has in fifty years, but they’re traditionalists through and through so damn if they’re going to be told what to do. 

The Winklevoss twins are standing at the top of the stairs. Well, kind of. Tyler is standing at the top of the stairs with Cameron’s body, and they both turn in perfect unison towards Divya and Mark, the tops of their hooded robes putting their faces in shadow. 

“Hey Div,” Tyler says out of both of their mouths, heads cocking in perfect unison. 

“The fuck,” Mark says, mostly under his breath, but not quietly enough and the twins have matching smug grins. 

“Cameron doing the practice run right now?” Divya says, gathering his bag of supplies out of his satchel.

“Yeah,” just Tyler says this time, clearly satisfied enough with freaking out Zuckerberg. “Keebler’s up tonight.” 

“Already?” 

“They grow up so fast,” Tyler says, clutching a hand to his chest. Beside him Cameron’s arm twitches with the movement like it’s tied to him by an invisible string. 

Mark is still eyeing Cameron’s body suspiciously when Chet Arlington sticks his head out the door and beacons them in. “We’re all ready.” 

“You did your test run without protections,” Divya says, not even bothering to keep the judgment out of his voice. 

“Cyrus made that call, not me,” Chet deflects, pulling his hood off his head, which really ruins the illusion. Plus has a zit on his chin, which does not exactly scream secret magic cult. 

“I mean if he doesn’t mind another dead Porc that’s fine, but it’s a fuck ton of paperwork for me, so don’t next time or there’ll be fines.” 

Luckily for Chet, and bank accounts of his fellow PC members, Divya’s attention is drawn away from the conversation as Maxwell Keaton Blake Christopher Rothschild V lets out a huge shuddering gasp from where he’s sitting in the centre of the room in an ornate carved chair 

“Hey, it’s okay,” The social chair, Elliot Greene, who went by Ellie, says, holding up a big ceremonial looking goblet that Divya knows from experience just has gatorade in it. Keaton takes huge gulps, eyes blown open like barn doors in a hurricane. “You did great, you got this.” 

“Cameron?” Keaton says in a wobbly little voice. 

“You did great,” Ellie repeats. “Just sit back and relax for a minute.” She puts the goblet in his hands and stands, dusting off the knees of her robe as she comes over to Divya. 

“Mark,” Divya says. “Start drawing the sigils. Compass points.” He gestures to the floor, where a circle is semi-visible already, decades and decades of the chalk going down and being scrubbed back up having ruined the finish of the hardwood floor. Mark doesn’t look thrilled but he goes without any further discussion, starting his circle right in front of a tangle of robed, whispering Porcs. Their robes are a dark Harvard Crimson that looks almost black in the dimness of the room. Only Keaton, still sitting in the circle of light, seems to be truly cloaked in red. 

“How’s the Dante,” Ellie says in a quiet, tactful way that Divya can’t help but associate with Cam. He’s always liked Ellie, who is one of only three current female members of the Porcellian alongside Charles “Charlie” McKinnon III, who he doesn’t really know, and Gregory “Rory” Townsend IV, who he’s had nothing but unpleasant experiences with. But she’s a girl named Gregory, so Divya figures he could cut her some slack, life dealt her a pretty crappy hand. 

“He’s picking it up,” Divya says diplomatically, the ‘surprisingly’ left unsaid. He doesn’t expect the clubs to forgive Mark for what he’s done, but he’s at least glad that Mark is showing himself to be competent enough that defending Lethe’s newest member is at least a little less like pulling out his own teeth. He’s still not happy about it, but he can put on a decent poker face for the clubs, which is a lot more important than his personal feelings. 

“We should be ready to go as soon as you’re set up,” Ellie says, adjusting the shoulders of her robe, which is too big on her. Another family hand-me-down like her name or her club, a little bit overbearing but something she was making work as best as she could. 

Divya checks over Mark’s sigils, and he only has to scrub out and fix one this time, a marked improvement over last month’s stint with The Owl. Out of the corner of his eye Divya sees the twins come into the room, both of them this time, their height not quite letting them blend into the rest of the faceless mass. 

“C’mere,” Divya says, tugging on Mark’s sleeve to get him out of the way and into the corner he always watches from, giving Cyrus a curt nod when he’s settled. Keaton’s looking a little less delicate in the chair, his hood back up and his expression set and serious as the rest of the Porcellian members fan out into a circle around him, and then on Cyrus’s signal step inside the chalk circle. 

“You gotta watch here because sometimes someone will smudge it and that’s bad news.” 

“Obviously,” Mark says, arms crossed tightly over his chest. 

Divya ignores his tone, like he’s been ignoring most of Mark’s attitude for the last two months. “Any unwanted guests?” 

Mark shakes his head. “No.” 

“Let's hope it stays that way,” Divya says, and darts his attention across the circle. From his vantage point he’s almost perfectually diagonally across from Cameron, himself again in a way Divya can tell even from here just by the set of his mouth. 

When he’d first been appointed Dante, Divya had spent a lot of time trying to understand everything he could about the intricacies of the Final Club rituals. What exactly each part was, what it meant, how it contributed to the rites as a whole. He’d spent weeks going over inscriptions in Latin and Greek, trying to weasel his way in between the words like it would be the encryption key that made everything make sense. 

He’s kind of over that now, because really, in the moment, when you’re trying to keep people from not dying, what exactly is being chanted stops being particularly interesting. Even when you’re talking about temporal astral projection as a means of prophecy. 

The Porcellian rite as such breaks down to a lot of Latin chanting as their chosen Vessel of the evening astral projects outside of their body with the help of some very powerful elixirs that even Lethe doesn’t have the details on. This leaves room for a Messenger of some future generation of Porcs to use the body of their own ancestor as a voice box. Divya hears Keaton’s body gasp in a way that doesn’t seem quite human, even though he’s heard it over a dozen times at this point, the brutal gasps of a drowning man coming up for air. 

_“Nomen tuum,”_ the circle says in unison. 

“Maxwell Keaton Blake Christopher Rothschild the Seventh,” the voice inside Keaton says, reedier than Keaton’s own voice. Well good for Keaton at least, not everyone gets their own grandkids, Tyler claims that the blood bond between family members makes the projection easier, but given that Tyler himself wouldn’t even know, Divya thinks it might just be psychosomatic. 

As it is Maxwell Keaton Blake Christopher Rothschild the Seventh launches into his prophecy, all Latin, of course, the Scribe to the left of Cyrus scribing furiously on a papyrus scroll with a quill pen while everyone else tries not to breathe. 

“Eleven o’clock,” Mark hisses into Divya’s ear, and Divya shifts his gaze, even though he knows he won’t be able to see anything. 

“What’s it doing?” 

“Nothing, it’s just there,” Mark says. 

“Okay, let me know if that changes, we gotta get through the dismount,” Divya says, trying to enunciate as much as possible to avoid raising his voice. Of the two rites the Porcellian does, accepting the Messenger has never been particularly dangerous. There’s always a slight danger in leaving someone’s physical body unoccupied while their self is being projected elsewhere, but the time between the Messenger leaving the body of the Vessel before they return is so short that Divya’s never had a problem with the circle holding. Sending a Messenger back in time is a much more dangerous operation, though less so now that the Porcellian has a secret weapon. 

“It’s fine,” Mark shrugs. “I don’t think it’s very interested.” 

Divya hates that he has to rely on Mark’s assessment of the situation, especially because he sees how Mark lives and he’s not sure if his definition of ‘fine’ is on the same metric as everyone else’s, but he doesn’t really have any other choice. 

And besides, the Porcs are chanting again and suddenly Keaton is heaving another waterlogged broken gasp as he comes back down into himself, closing the ritual with an audible collective exhale. The Scribe lays out the new scroll of prophecy into a velvet lined steel lock box where it will rest until the Porcellian Luncheon on Sunday when it will be interpreted, memorized, and destroyed.

“Good going Keebs!” Tyler is saying, pulling his hood off his head and bounding over to where Keaton is keeled over in the ornate chair. Reaching for the goblet of gatorade that Ellie had been helping him drink from earlier. The whole thing had taken less than ten minutes from when Divya had walked into the room, and the mood was rapidly shifting into the mundane, the same sweet relief of students leaving an exam room. 

“So, can I go?” Mark says, hands shoved into the kangaroo pouch of his hoodie. 

“Yeah, fine, you’re dismissed Dante,” Divya says, giving him a hand wave. Technically he should make Mark stay and erase the circle with him, but it’s not worth the effort it would take when Divya just needs to run a damp paper towel over the floor. 

“Cool,” Mark says, handing Divya back the bag of chalk and darting off through the open door, moving with a nimbleness that he clearly had not possessed in getting here. 

Divya scrubs the floor with his foot, watching without looking as the twins help Keaton to his feet, Tyler holding him up while Cameron pulls his robe off. 

“You’ll feel better when we get to the party,” Tyler says cheerfully, giving him a little shake that seems like a bad idea in his present condition. 

The Porcellian itself didn’t technically host parties, but there was always some party after Vessel rites. Divya doesn’t know the details because he doesn’t get invited to these sorts of things and he wouldn’t go even if he was. He does a double check of the room, and when he’s satisfied he heads over to let Cyrus know that Lethe acknowledges the ritual as complete. Normally he’d wait to say good night to Cameron and Tyler, but they have their hands full with Keaton, so he just says a quick goodbye to Ellie collecting robes at the door. 

“So exciting about gay marriage, right?” she says with an amicable little grin. 

“Pardon?” 

“The prophecy,” she says. “That gay marriage is going to be legalized? At least that was my reading, you know they’re always a little vague.” 

“Well, fingers crossed,” Divya says, because he’s not about to admit how subpar his Latin is. But he appreciates Ellie’s enthusiasm nonetheless, though he feels a bit bad that his gentle letting her down two years ago had resulted in the miscommunication of where exactly his attraction fell regarding women. But hey, sometimes it’s easier to just let people come to their own conclusions; just like the Porcellian prophecies. Playing with temporal magic is serious stuff, and putting anything too clearly is just tempting fate to try and open up some universe swallowing paradox nonsense, so Porcellian keeps it vague. Divya thinks maybe there’s a better use for veil ripping temporal self projection, but they seem like they’re enjoying their little Latin poems with clues about upcoming presidential elections and good startup investments. 

He sets off across Harvard Square on his usual route back to Lethe House before doubling back through a small alley between a hipster coffee place and a used bookstore towards campus, making sure to avoid any loud rowdy groups of students. Thursday nights are for rites but it’s also the unofficial start to the weekend and there’s clumps of partygoers like blood clots all along his path, which means a lot of ducking and weaving to more indirect routes. 

As it is, Cameron beats Divya back to his own dorm even though Divya left the Porcellian first, casually flicking through his phone and managing to avoid the appearance that he’s looking for anyone at all. They’re definitely getting the timing of this down better, Divya hates having to wait outside, attempting not to look like he’s waiting and always failing. Cameron always manages to make it look effortless, even if Divya is irrationally annoyed that he beat him here. 

“That went pretty well,” Cameron says once they’re inside, feet echoing side by side up the stairwell.

“Hmm,” Divya agrees. “How’s Keebler doing?” 

“He’ll be fine, first time is hard,” Cam pauses thoughtfully. “I mean. So I’ve heard. I wouldn’t really know. But Tyler will take care of him.” 

“Can’t you tell, though?” Divya says, watching as Cam unlocks the door, having the strangest urge to reach over and take Cam’s keys right out of his hand and do it for him. 

“What?” Cam says and Divya waits until they’re inside the dorm to explain. There’s a book held upside down on the coffee table in their little common area like someone left in a surprise. Probably Tyler, who was always trying to squeeze in one more thing before going anywhere, a habit that drove Cam crazy.

“You know like, when you— when you do the trial run. Can’t you tell how hard it is for him, I mean like? Don’t you feel it?” 

“Oh,” Cameron says, flushing. “It’s. It’s sort of hard to describe.” 

Divya chews the inside of his mouth. It’s not really in his nature to apologize as a nicety (Erica would probably say it’s not in his nature to apologize at all, but he doesn’t think he’s infallible, he just likes to mean it. Besides, their relationship, for lack of a better term, was nebulous and ever evolving. They sleep together with a certain regularly and exclusivity, and Divya likes Cam as a person, likes Cameron a _lot_ as a person. But while there were clearly some reciprocal feelings on that front, their positions make concepts like ‘dating’ and ‘boyfriend’ into liabilities. 

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Divya settles on, reaching up and touching Cam on the shoulder, Cam’s whole body deflating slightly as tension drains out of him. 

“What do you want to talk about?” Cam says, too sweet to be coy, lifting Divya’s hand off his shoulder and bringing it to his mouth, kissing Divya in the centre of his palm. 

“Maybe the Porc should switch methods, get into palmistry,” Divya says. “Snap it up before the Delphic decides that’s their new thing.” 

“You do have a very nice love line,” Cam says, pulling Divya’s hand back, and tracing a finger gently over his palm. 

“I regret to inform you that that’s actually my fate line.” Cameron looks up at him in unconcealed surprise. “What? I read. Plus, Erica’s all over this kind of stuff. I get a lot of it by osmosis.” 

“I guess the Delphics can have it then,” Cam says. 

“There’s other things your hands can say about the future of your love life though,” Divya says carefully, taking a half step into Cam’s personal space. “Hands?” 

Cam offers them, a little bemused but always one to go with a bit. Divya looks at them intensely for a long moment. “Hmmm yeah I’m getting a lot here.” 

“Divya— ” 

“Like this,” Divya says, turning Cam’s hands over, palm down and then pulling them towards him by the wrists and settling them very matter of factly on his ass. “See?” 

Divya feels Cam’s hands flex and hears the little shaky click of his breath in his throat. “No, you’re right, this is. Very informative about my immediate future.”

Divya’s thing with Cameron Winklevoss only happened because they’d both had too much time on their hands for bright ambitious young men of Harvard left alone for a summer with very little to do but each other. 

Well alright, that maybe wasn’t technically true, Divya had a lot to do to prepare for his first solo year as Dante, which was extra intimidating because his own Virgil, Marylin, had done an extra long stint herself, having gone to Harvard for both undergrad and Law School. Which meant she was both effortlessly good at her job and that she’d been there long enough that even the oldest members of the clubs didn’t remember a time when she wasn’t involved. 

So it wasn’t that Divya didn’t have anything to do, but there was only so long he could read old Lethe journals and run himself through ritual protocol flashcards. And, technically, keeping an eye on Cameron had been part of his job. 

Divya didn’t ask, and Summers wouldn’t tell, how exactly they tracked which incoming freshmen had unconventional special abilities, though he assumed something a little more ethically dubious than admission essays. There were only a handful at any given time, and Marylin had explained that often they’d be snapped up by clubs, which made keeping track of what they were up to a little easier. 

The only new contacts Divya’s freshman year had been the Winklevoss twins, who back then had been a little more gangly and awkward, still adjusting into their growth spurts. He remembers that Tyler had been slightly shorter then, which had stirred up a sense of camaraderie Divya never expected to have with anyone over six foot. 

“I’m going to let you take the reins this one,” Marylin said, his first solo task as Dante. “You’ll be here together anyways, so there’s no point in making a big transition next year.” 

So the twins were Divya’s business, something he’d been perhaps a little overzealous to do well, having read over and over the accounts the twins had written about their abilities to prepare himself easily a dozen times, maybe more. He could tell them apart better by their handwriting than their faces. 

Still nothing had truly prepared him to stand in the foyer at Lethe House and to watch Cameron Winklevoss’s soul leave his body. 

“I got him,” Tyler had said, catching his brother’s body with an easy showmanship, words like _shell_ and _husk_ coming to mind unbidden as Divya tried to keep the horror off his face. It wasn’t the visceral, stomach-turning horror of a Phoenix Prognostication, but there was something about seeing Cameron’s body, empty in a way that even a corpse wasn’t, that peeled away months of careful Lethe preparation and left Divya feeling raw and exposed like the nerve on a broken tooth.

“And then I just,” Tyler said, and suddenly there was something behind Cameron’s eyes again, and he stood unassisted. 

“Ta-da,” they said in unison. No, _Tyler_ said, one voice, two mouths, hands in identical poses. 

“Well that’s. Unusual,” Divya said trying to look unimpressed even as the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. “So where’s Cameron?” 

_“Over here,”_ Cameron’s voice crackled over the intercom that was set into one wall of the foyer. 

Divya wondered, almost childishly, what Cameron looked like when he wasn’t in his body, his mind bringing up nothing but Haunted Mansion ghosts and shimmering entities from Star Trek The Next Generation. 

“That’s different,” Marylin said from the staircase, unperturbed and understated as always. 

Cameron seemed to snap back into place at that, smiling at her all New England Old Money (though Divya would find out later that the Winklevoss’s money was much, much newer than they liked to let on), and Divya’s insides unknotted themselves just slightly. He could totally handle this, probably, and besides, the Winklevoss twins were too busy with their rowing schedule to get into too much trouble. 

As it was Divya only saw them a handful of times during their freshman year, mostly during their regularly scheduled Lethe check-ins, but occasionally on campus, or once when Divya was monitoring a party at The Fly, Tyler dragging him over to a group of co-eds and introducing him as his ‘very good personal friend Div.’ 

He’d also seen enough stuff during the school year that a lot of his initial horror over Cameron’s weird lifeless not-corpse body had faded. It was hard to sit through ten months of Spee Necromancy and Owl Club Blood rites and get too up in arms about someone who just had a very loose connection with the physical plane. 

That and the sinking loneliness of summer in Cambridge meant that bumping into Cameron on campus had been less awkward small talk with someone he was the steward of and a lot more like bumping into an old friend, both of them clearly a little desperate to have someone to talk to. 

“We should get lunch,” Cameron had said. “My treat, seriously, I’m free whenever. Just call me.” 

And Divya had, if only for the excuse to get out of Lethe House for a few hours, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Cam in a tiny Mexican restaurant that didn’t card, drinking Coronas and trying all the different tacos on the menu, insisting the other needed to try their new favourite. It was nice, and without really meaning to Divya had let Cameron slip into his orbit, finding that he didn’t mind it as much as he’d thought he might. 

Besides, back then Cameron hadn’t been in the Porcellian, so while the Lethe end of their arrangement was less than kosher, it didn’t feel so much like crossing explicit boundaries. 

The boundary crossing didn’t start until Fourth of July weekend, Divya having gotten a very late night call from Cameron, an actual call mind you, and not the weird thing he did on occasion inhabiting Divya’s phone because Divya had run out of minutes. 

“Div?” Cameron said. “Divya, something’s happened.” The words came out smeared together like paint on a canvas. 

“What’s wrong? Where are you?” Divya said, already rummaging around for his shoes. 

“It’s just supposed— it’s a Sigma Chi thing but there’s some Spee guys here, they wanted to talk to me.” 

It was no secret that the necromancers in Spee had been chomping at the bit at the idea of bringing Cameron into their fold. Someone who could untether from their body at will would open lots of exciting possibilities for their rites, and they’d been hounding Cameron on and off since last semester. What Spee was offering, in Divya’s semi-professional opinion, sounded like a great way to get possessed, but since Cameron had never really seemed that interested, he hadn’t been too concerned. 

Until now that was. 

“I keep— ” Cam said and then his voice cut jaggedly. “It’s like. I keep sort of half slipping involuntarily. It’s never— I think maybe I got spiked with something, I don’t— ” 

“Cameron? Cam?” Divya called, taking the stairs two at a time into the attic library, “C’mon you gotta stay with me, buddy.” 

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” Cameron said. 

“Where is it, fuck where is it,” Divya muttered, keeping his phone tight to his ear with his shoulder, scrambling through drawers of carefully catalogued magical objects, knocking things out of place until he found the innocuous little bag. Yale Blue, typical. 

“Thank you Scroll & Key,” Divya said to himself. 

“Di—Di—Divya?” Cameron said, voice skipping like a record player. 

“Stand back,” Divya said, fingers somehow both trembling and stiff as he worked the bag open. 

“What?” 

“Stand back,” Divya said, popped the mushroom into his mouth and bit down, ignoring the musty taste and thinking as hard as he could of Cameron and jumping. 

“Oh fuck!” Cameron said, catching him as Divya came out the other end of a portal into a random bedroom at Sigma Chi, and then immediately collapsed to the ground. 

“Cam, shit,” Divya said. “Can you get up?” 

“I don’t—don’t—” His voice glitched again, more upsetting in person where Divya could see the shift behind his eyes, Cameron’s non-corporeal self at odds with his physical form. “There was a drink. I don’t know.” 

Divya was gonna throw the fucking book at Spee Club so hard they were going to be paying fines from beyond the grave. Which he could totally make them do with their necromancy bullshit. 

He cursed himself for not having the foresight to bring along anything helpful from Lethe House, having been too preoccupied with just getting there as quickly as possible. 

“What happens if you slip out right now?” Divya said. “What’s our worst case?” 

“I don’t know. Div, I don’t know.” 

He thinks back to Cameron and Tyler’s handwritten accounts. A long metaphor about how Cameron was two magnets with a weaker magnetic attraction than most, how he could slip out of himself, yet still be innately attracted back into his physical form. That was part of what made it so appealing to certain kinds of magic rites. Getting someone out of their corporeal form wasn’t the hard part — Porcellian had been doing that for literal centuries — it was getting them back in which got tricky. But if Spee had drugged Cameron with something that was impairing his ability to stay in his body, who knew what it would do to his ability to return to it..

“Okay well then you just need to stay put in there then, okay?” Divya said. “You’ve gotta do your mediation thing you do to sleep.” 

“I—I—I,” Cameron tried, lights flickering. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. 

“I’m here, I’m not going to let anything bad happen. I’m the Dante, you just have to trust me.” 

Cameron was still flat on his back on the floor and Divya was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to get up, and he wasn’t about to deadlift two hundred pounds. He ran back through everything he could remember Cameron having told him about the ways he tried to keep himself in his body while he slept. Breathing exercises, meditation, special weighted blanket. 

Christ. Okay. It wasn’t exactly how Divya had pictured himself climbing on top of a guy at a Sigma Chi party, but desperate times etcetera. 

“Just stay calm,” Divya said, and then swung himself over Cameron’s waist, straddling his torso and leaning forward to pin his wrists to the ground. 

“What?” Cameron said, voice cracking a little but not glitching. 

“Breathe with me,” Divya said, having no choice but to look him in the eye, their faces less than a foot apart. “Breathe.” 

Divya felt as much as heard Cameron exhale, eyes wide but occupied. Lights were on. Someone was home. They breathed together once more, twice more, third time something flickered out behind his eyes for a moment before coming back.

“Divya.” 

“Shhh, I’ve got you, keep breathing,” Divya said. Cameron’s shirt had ridden up just slightly where Divya had straddled him, warm everywhere but almost hot where his bare skin pressed up against Divya’s leg.

Cameron exhaled hard, bottom lip jutting out with the movement, “Better?” Divya asked. 

“Better,” Cameron agreed. “My legs are still a little…”

“Here,” Divya said. “Let me just,” he pulled Cameron’s hands from where he’d pinned them over his head, bringing them down farther and pinning them again along his sides, and then started to shift back so he could sit more over Cameron’s hips. 

“Wait,” Cameron started, but Divya had already moved. 

“Oh,” Divya said. 

“I’m sorry,” Cameron said, shutting his eyes tight. 

“No, it’s. I mean. That’s a good sign right? That you’re really in your body.” Divya said, trying to mentally calculate a way that he could rearrange himself that wouldn’t involve rubbing his ass on Cam’s erection. There really wasn’t one so he stayed put. 

“I—I—” Cameron said. 

“No, hey, please don’t freak out,” Divya said. “I promise it’s fine. Just. Keep breathing okay?” 

“I’m sor—orry.” The lights started flickering behind his eyes again. 

“Cam, no please, just. Stay with me okay?” Divya said, panic starting to rise again, and it was more instinct than anything else which made him lean down and kiss Cameron, because it seemed like the easiest way to convey the twelve or so reasons why it really wasn’t the worst thing ever that Cameron’s dick was very hard and pressed up against his ass. 

“Oh, alright,” Cameron exhaled more than said when Divya pulled away, only for a moment, before he kissed him again. 

Cameron seemed to still be using most of his willpower to stay inside of his body, but Divya didn’t really mind taking the lead, trying to space their kisses like lightning following thunder, inhale, kiss, exhale, kiss, repeat. 

Divya doesn’t exactly remember when he let go of Cam’s wrists, one of his hands coming up, one on Divya’s hip, the other just barely resting over Divya’s shoulder blade. Divya’s own hands were on Cameron’s neck, thumbs under his jaw when the bedroom door banged open, spilling an oilslick of light into the room. 

“Oh my god, _sorry_!” A girl’s voice said, scandalized but mostly apologetic as the door thudded shut again. 

Cameron swallowed, loud in the room like the rumble of a storm, “Um, I think I’m okay.” 

“Good,” Divya sat up a little but otherwise didn’t move, “The House of Lethe is glad to be of service,” he said, and then immediately regretted putting it like that. Like making out with Cameron Winklevoss in a frantic bid to get him to stay inside his body at the peril of Spee elixirs was just another item on his sanctioned Dante duties daily check-list. 

“Sorry,” Cam said, mouth wet in a way that Divya couldn’t stop looking at, “Uh, I think you’re okay to get up now. Thanks for, you know…I guess that’s your job, huh?” 

In his mind’s eye Divya could see the rest of his night unfold perfectly. He’d get up, they’d laugh about it, he’d walk back to Lethe, file a report, throw the book as hard as he fucking could at the Spee Club, and then they’d never talk about this again. And from how panicked Cameron had looked, Divya was nervous that his plan to not talk about it ever again would involve not talking to Divya ever again. 

“I mean,” Divya said, very carefully. “If you’re okay, then I’m technically off the clock.” 

Cameron looked up at him through his lashes. “Oh?” 

“Mhmm,” Divya said, leaning forward very cautiously, and kissing up Cameron’s jaw, moving slowly, giving Cam the freedom to pull away at any time before he reached his mouth again. 

Divya didn’t make it to Cameron’s mouth though before he found himself the one pinned flat on his back on the carpet. 

You win some, you lose some. 

And forty-five minutes later, as he panted on top of some Sigma Chi brother’s shockingly nice sheets, Divya was pretty sure he’d won more than he’d lost. 

“Wow,” Divya said, breath still settling back into his chest, as Cam flopped down on top of him. It was a little painful having that much dead weight drop on him, but honestly after that performance Divya was not going to complain. 

“Holy fuck Cam,” he said kissing him on the shoulder, which was the least sweaty part of Cam he could reach with him collapsed like this over him. “That was. Wow.”

Divya was going to look up if that portal mushroom, a gift from the Yale Lethe chapter, had some kind of erogenous benefits on top of by-the-book portal magic. He’d have to ask next time he dragged himself to New Haven. 

“Okay champ,” Divya said, patting Cameron’s back. “You did a great job, but you’ve gotta roll over because I’m very attached to the current configuration of my internal organs.” 

Cameron didn’t say anything, didn’t move, and panic cut through Divya’s afterglow like a powerwasher. “Cam … Cameron?” Nothing. “Fuck!” Divya cursed, struggling for a minute to get Cameron off of him and onto his back. Cameron’s head lolled off the pillow, eyes unfocused and blank. 

“Shit, shit, shit,” Divya said, cursing himself for being such a fucking idiot for thinking that sexual healing was a remotely acceptable antidote for Spee Club charms. “Cam, c’mon, c’mon.” 

He darted a glance around the room, like he was going to see Cam hovering in transparent photo negative like Casper the Friendly Ghost. 

Divya wasn’t sure what his next move was. He could attempt to go shake down those assholes from Spee, maybe see if they’d help him in a little tit for tat. Though Cameron being naked was going to be kind of hard to explain. Divya was still mulling his options over when Cam let out a shaky exhale, eyes fluttering back as his hands reached up for Divya. 

“I AM SO SORRY!” Cameron said much too loudly. “I didn’t mean to do that!”

He blushed, hard, and that was all the evidence Divya needed to put together what had just happened. 

“Oh?” He asked. “That happen often?” 

“Um, not usually,” Cameron said sheepishly. “Or. Ever.” 

“Never?” 

Cam squeezed his eyes shut. “Uh, no.” 

“Damn,” Divya said. 

“Sorry, I was just kind of, floaty for a minute there and I couldn’t get back down.” 

Divya settled back into the bed, trying to relax even has his heart continued to rampage behind his ribs. “Non-corporeal afterglow?” 

Cameron turned over onto his side, he was flushed over his chest. “Something like that. I’ve had that happen before with like, other intense... _sensations_. Like when I was nine and I jumped off the swing set and broke my arm, I just— ” Cam made a _phfwt!_ noise with his mouth hand going sailing. “But it’s never happened during sex before, I’m— sorry if I scared you.” 

“Do _not_ apologize,” Divya said. “Seriously don’t, this is great for my ego.” 

“But— ” 

“Cam,” Divya said. “Stop ruining this for me, how many people can say they literally gave their partner an out of body experience?” 

Cameron rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t totally cover his grin, and he shut up about it well enough. Or maybe that was because Divya leaned in to get things started on round two and he had better things to do with his mouth. Really, it was anyone’s guess. 

“Fucking shit,” Divya says, sitting up in bed. 

“Stop checking your email,” Cam mumbles, rolling over to press his face into Divya’s upper arm. 

“Stop falling asleep and I won’t,” Divya snaps back, a little meaner than was entirely called for. 

Cam opens his eyes, but he doesn’t look hurt, which is worse somehow because Divya knows he _knows_ something else is happening.

“Summers wants to meet with me. Immediately.” 

“Oh,” Cam says, rolling back into his own space, which isn’t much, even in the double bed he’d upgraded to since freshman summer. “Did he say why?” 

“Of course not, don’t give the man too much credit. If he told me what this meeting was about, then how would he be able to have the upper hand?” 

“Ah yes,” Cam says.

Divya’s thumbs hover over the keys for a long few minutes, not because he doesn’t know how to reply (Lethe says jump, he asks how high), but because he doesn’t _want_ to. 

Which is weird for Divya because as long as he’s known about his family connections to Lethe House, ever since he was old enough to understand what happens in the clubs and his family’s own legacy with the organization, he’s _wanted_ to be a part of it. Forced himself through Latin, Greek, extra chem, extra bio in high school just for that chance, one hundred thousand to one, to do this job. 

And he really, really, _really_ does not want to have to do it right now. 

“You know what I really want?” Divya says. 

“What?” Cam asks, even though it was rhetorical. 

“Just a huge fucking gyro with like. An insane amount of tzatziki.” 

Cameron rolls back over. “Yeah?” he asks hesitantly, like he’s not exactly sure what the game is. 

“Yeah,” Divya says, shoving his phone onto Cam’s bedside table. “Yeah I could really go for that right now.” 

“I could go for that too,” Cam says. “With those spicy potatoes. And a chocolate shake.” 

“Whoa, living on the wild side,” Divya says, leaning half out of bed so he can reach around for his discarded clothes. 

“That’s me,” Cam says, leaning over and kissing Divya’s shoulder. “Mr. Irresponsible.” 

Divya uses a mirror glamour, even though it’s almost three in the morning and anyone who’s likely to spot him with Cameron Winklevoss is probably too drunk to notice or care, but the cover of anonymity seems to embolden both of them. Leaning on each other in a way that is blatantly non-platonic as they wait for their orders in the tiny all-hours Greek diner a few blocks off campus. Cam’s hand on his back, his hip, his waist, as they walk back, trading off the bag between them. 

“Ohh booo, assholes,” Tyler whines from where he’s flopped on the couch when they come back into the apartment, having returned from the party while they were gone. “Where’s mine?” 

“Yes, whoever could have seen that coming,” Divya says, rummaging around in the bag and throwing the tinfoil wrapped hockey puck of a hamburger underhand at Tyler. 

“Ohhhh, my _man_ ,” Tyler cheers. “Lethe House come through.” 

“How was the party?” Cam asks, carefully unpacking everything. 

“Pretty fun,” Tyler says. “Nice face by the way, Div.” 

“Thanks, I borrowed it from the Fly.” Divya sits on the end of their couch, unwrapping his gyro. 

“He really can wear anything,” Cameron says to Tyler in that flitty rich person way he sometimes slips into, the genteel society man, and Divya plays along by mostly pretending he didn’t hear it. 

“I should go back to Lethe,” Divya says a while later, gyro consumed and half asleep, listed over into Cameron’s side. 

“You should go the fuck to bed dude,” Tyler says. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep your secret that even the Virgil needs to sleep sometimes.” 

Divya flips him off and forces himself upright, trying to shake the sleep from himself like a wet dog. “No, it’s fine. I shouldn’t have stayed so late anyways.” He has basso belladonna drops in his satchel, but the hangover isn’t really worth it for something like this. 

“Div,” Cameron says, hand on Divya’s back as he leans over the arm of the couch, trying to remember what he did with his shoes when they got back from the diner. “Come to bed— ” 

“I need to get back before— ” 

“ —I’ll wake you up early,” Cam says, thumb rubbing back and forth. “Just say you went for a jog or something.” 

“This isn’t really a jogging ensemble,” Divya points out, even as he lets Cam gently guide him onto his feet. 

“Go get breakfast then, those bagels you like,” Cam says, so close behind Divya they practically slot together, nested like spoons in a drawer. 

“If you can’t beat ‘em distract ‘em?” 

“Something like that,” Cam says, and Divya would argue back that he’s well aware that’s exactly what Cam is doing in this moment, but he needs his last dregs of consciousness solely focused on getting as undressed as possible before he just collapses into Cameron’s bed, sinking deep into the undertow of sleep with no resistance. 

The same cannot be said of waking up only a few hours later, every part of his brain and body screeching to be left to rest, even as Cam’s hands shake him gently from sleep. 

“No,” Divya says, mostly into the pillow. 

“If I let you keep sleeping, Awake Divya will be so much meaner to me later than Tired Divya is right now, c’mon, up you get.” 

“Wanna bet?” Divya says with a glare and sitting up, taking the parcel of his folded clothes from Cam. 

“Yeah, I’ll take those odds,” Cameron says, snorting a laugh when Divya shoves past him. He spends twenty minutes in the bathroom, five fixing his hair and gargling mouthwash and fifteen attempting to make it look like he’s not wearing the same clothes from yesterday. It’s mostly a lost cause, and he resigns himself to his walk of shame. 

“I’ll call you later?” Cam asks, like he’s half expecting Divya to say no. As if Cameron’s not the one doing all the work by disengaging himself from his physical form and drifting all the way across campus to Lethe House to inhabit Divya’s phone. 

“What, Tyler won’t mind holding down the fort?” Divya asks. 

Cam shrugs. “I mean, he’ll be the one here if I get possessed by some sort of opportunistic ghost. It’s in his best interest too.” 

“Let me get back to you, I’ve still gotta deal with Summers,” Divya pulls his satchel over his shoulder. 

“Sure,” Cam says, hovering, in the non-literal sense thankfully, at the door. They’ve gotten good enough at this transition over the last two and a half years, when they have to go back to being representatives of organizations much larger, older, and powerful than either of them. No ill-advised sleepover or late night gyro run overrides that fact. 

Which is good; Divya never would have let this go on for as long as he has, wouldn’t have already started to shift his focus to the _What If_ after they graduate if Cam hadn’t proven himself again and again to be reliably professional and appropriately detached when he needs to be. 

And yet. 

He’s not sure what he would do if Cameron ever kissed him goodbye but he’s curious enough that he always tilts his face towards Cam as he leaves, like he’s daring him to be a little less reliable. Cameron never takes the bait, and Divya will never push it. They’re magnets with the same polarization and it’s why they work, pushing back against each other in just the right way to keep everything in balance. 

Divya gives his head a shake, crossing through the threshold past Cam and into the hallway of the twins’ dorm. He already has enough to deal with between Mark and Summers, the fact that he and Cameron can handle each other more or less on autopilot is not exactly a bad thing. 

And yet. 

Divya finds himself more and more focused on that far off horizon of graduation, and what it’s going to mean for both of them when their number one priorities are no longer inexorably tied to their organizations. Still, it’s too far off to get overly preoccupied with, especially when he still has an uphill battle with preparing Mark to carry on as Dante without someone peering over his shoulder. 

It’s not that Mark is unintelligent, or even uninterested, but he’s the kind of stubborn that makes even the most straightforward Lethe business take hours instead of minutes, days instead of hours. Divya’s pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg never met a hypothetical situation he didn’t like, and most of his Dante training has felt more like dealing with a toddler going through the ‘why?’ phase. Actually scratch that, at least toddlers grow out of that phase. Mark seems absolutely uninterested in being anything but dead weight in this process. 

Which is why it’s shocking almost to the point of absurdity that Mark is sitting in the foyer of Lethe House when Divya rolls in with a brown paper bag of bagels at just after seven. 

Mark blinks up from his laptop screen, the only light in the room, and squints at Divya. 

“Uh, hi,” Divya says, trying not to let his surprise show on his face. 

Mark stands wordlessly, balancing his laptop on a shiny glazed end table and padding off down the hall towards the kitchen at the back of the first floor. He shuffles more than walks, feet hardly coming off the ground in that way Divya can’t help but associate with moody teenagers. 

“Erica!” Mark calls into the kitchen. “Divya’s back.” 

“Oh!” Erica’s voice says, and then after a moment her face appears at the end of the hall, “Hey, everything okay?” 

“Um, yeah, I just went out to get bagels,” Divya says, following Mark down the hall and into the kitchen, where Erica has a whole battalion of little prep bowls spread across the butcher block at the centre of the room. Though whether she’s testing some new magic for Lethe or just making a smoothie is anyone’s guess, the blender not really adding any clarity to the situation. 

“You didn’t come back last night,” Mark says, leaning against one of the stools. 

_You weren’t supposed to notice that_ , Divya doesn’t say. 

“I waited for you so we could debrief,” Mark says. 

“I needed to take care of some things. It ended up being a long night.” 

“Did everything go alright with the twins?” Erica says, grabbing the mortar and pestle from the counter. “Do we need to be worried?” 

“You don't, I handled it.” 

“I mean, when you didn’t come back I figured you _definitely_ handledit,” Mark says, immediately reaching for the bag of bagels, voice heavy with implication. 

“Excuse me?” Divya says, sharp and quick because what the fuck, what the _fuck_. 

“Alright Mark, don’t be an asshole,” Erica says, pestle in one hand, with an edge like she might not be afraid to use it if the situation demands it. 

“Look, I know _you_ don’t take this very seriously,” Divya starts, “but checking up on these things is very literally my job. It’s supposed to be _your_ job too but you wanted to leave early, so I saved you the trouble of having to deal with club members, who, need I remind you, are not exactly huge fans of yours.” 

“Whoa,” Mark says, holding his hands in front of him in surrender for a long moment before taking his bagel over to the counter and their fire hazard of a toaster. 

Erica raises her eyebrows at Divya in a gesture he finds frustratingly vague, and he’s not sure if she’s on his side or judging him for being harsh. 

“Just to clarify,” Mark says, turning back with a large serrated knife in hand. 

“Christ, put that down,” Erica interjects. 

“I wasn’t _—_ I know it’s part of your job to make sure that they’re okay. I wasn’t being homophobic or something. Obviously I don’t care if you spend the night with your boyfriend.” 

He might as well have run Divya through with that stupid serated knife, and Divya lets out a weird involuntary squeaking scoff.

“ _Mark_ ,” Erica snaps. 

“Erica,” Mark mimics. 

“You can’t say things like that.” 

“Things like what?” Mark says slowly. 

“That Divya would _—_ they take shit like that really seriously.” 

“They?” 

“Lethe Board, Summers, you know, those people who pay us?” Erica says, and then looks over at Divya, who is still trying to get his brain back on track. “Oh my god, are you okay? You look like you’re going to spontaneously develop an ulcer.” 

“I’m _—_ ” Divya tries. His whole brain has gone pins and needles, trying to stand after cutting off the circulation for too long. 

Mark gestures with the knife. “I don’t understand.” 

“It’s not that complicated,” Erica says. “Don’t fuck anyone in final clubs is practically our motto. Summers will lose his shit if he hears you joking about it.” 

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about _—_ ” Mark blinks at Divya. “So the disembodied Winklevoss twin _isn’t_ your boyfriend?” 

Erica laughs and then stops very abruptly when she catches sight of Divya’s expression. His face feels so, so warm but ice water is pouring down the back of his neck. 

“No,” he snaps, finally managing to pull back his voice from whatever plane of existence it had startled out from. “Cameron Winklevoss is _not_ my boyfriend.” 

Mark’s expression of annoyed confusion doesn’t lift. “Okay, then why is he always coming over to the house?” 

“Uh, you mean the beginning of the semester check-in? That’s routine for anyone of interest, your buddy Dustin was there too.” 

“No, no,” Mark says. 

“Okay, seriously, stop waving that knife around.” 

Mark ignores Erica. “No, he comes over here like. At least twice a week. Tuesday and Thursday usually. I’ve seen him going up the stairs and into your room.”

For a second Divya is already drafting the email to Summers, that clearly Mark Zuckerberg is unfit to be Dante if he’s this detached from reality, because Cameron hasn’t set foot inside Lethe House for months. 

Or well, not unless you count _—_

“You can see Cam when he’s non-corporeal,” Divya says as soon as he thinks it. Fuck. Shit. Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

He is so screwed. 

Mark’s shoulders twitch in a lazy shrug. “Yeah.” 

“Div,” Erica says, “What is he talking about? You’re not _—_ you’re not actually dating someone in a _club_ right? Because that would be insane.” 

“Wait, you didn’t know?” Mark says to Erica. 

“No, I did not know Cameron Winklevoss was slipping out of his physical body twice a week to visit our Virgil,” Erica says, crossing her arms snugly over her chest. 

“That doesn’t mean he’s my boyfriend!” Divya snaps, which does nothing but make Mark and Erica exchange glances. 

“I can’t believe this,” she says, going back to her pestle. “This is literally _—_ ” she laughs, “Divya Narendra breaking a Lethe rule, I never thought I’d see the day.” 

“Yeah, but I mean those are just like, guidelines right? No one takes them that seriously,” Mark says, seeming to have abandoned the dream of toasting his bagel and just eating it plain. 

Erica stops grinding. “Do you not know what happened to Sean Parker?” 

“Yeah but that was like _—_ they wouldn’t kick Divya out for shacking up with one of the Winklevii.” 

“Ehhh they might,” Erica says with a shrug, and then looks at Divya pointedly. “Which is why Mark and I are going to keep this newfound information very, very, close to the chest. Right, Mark?” 

Divya does not find that even remotely comforting. 

“Damn, so you’re like, actually kind of badass?” Mark muses, in a way that’s far too much of a question to really be complimentary. “That’s sort of awesome. You’re breaking the Jedi code for forbidden love. Respect.” 

Divya realizes suddenly that his hands are clenched so tightly that the bones of his hands are creaking, and he has a brief but intense impulse to reach out and smack Mark upside the head as he sneaks past him, grabbing another bagel from the bag. 

“So is this a bad time to tell you that Summers called twice already demanding to meet with you immediately?” Erica asks after the sound of Mark going up the stairs recedes, not looking up from where she’s pouring the contents of the mortar into the blender. 

“Christ,” Divya says, in lieu of an answer and leaves the kitchen before another catastrophic revelation is hoisted upon him. 

If this meeting with Summers is anything other than a dull routine check, Divya thinks he might well and truly lose his mind. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to youshallnotfinditso for the loan of her Porcellian OCs Chet, Cyrus, Elliot, and Keaton.


	2. Part II: The Oculus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Warning(s): Blood drawing

_Lethe’s Cambridge operations are headquartered proudly in the historic Harvard Square District. The Cunningridge Residence, primarily known as Lethe House, was donated to Lethe by Daniel Cunningridge III (Virgil, Class of 1895). It was Cunningridge’s hope that a centralized communal residence for Lethe officers would encourage meaningful — but appropriate — bonds between those who serve._

_—from, **A Crimson River: Procedures of Lethe at Harvard and Beyond** _

_Don’t shit where you eat. ‘Nuff said._

_— from **Lethe Diary of Sean Parker, Dante, ~~Class of 2000~~ Expelled 1997. **_

**_Part II_ ** _: The Oculus_

Let the record show that as much as Divya might huff and puff about Mark Zuckerberg, Erica had been the one to deal with his bullshit first. 

And that was way before Divya had dragged him by the scruff of his neck into the foyer at Lethe House, Mark looking around with the kind of expression of someone who was lost and didn’t want to admit it, eyes just a little too wide as he took it in. 

“Mark,” Divya said, “this is Erica Albright, our Oculus. She runs the house.” 

“Hi,” Erica said flatly. “Good to see you again, Mark.” 

Mark had squinted up at her. “Erica?” 

“Yeah, hi. _You’re_ the new Dante?” Christ, she’d imagined a lot of things about Mark Zuckerberg, the infamous creator of the Facebook, Lethe rogue brought into the fold, but she’d never imagined that he’d be _that_ Mark.

Divya looked between the two of them distrustfully. “Do you. Do you two know each other?” 

Erica snorted. “We did a group project together once,” she said, the _relax Divya_ , left unspoken because in an entire year of working with Divya she’d never seen him relax even once.

“Summers didn’t mention that,” Divya said. 

“What, he didn’t give you my entire class schedule and everyone in it?” Erica deadpanned, leaning over the bannister. 

“Funny,” Divya said, already climbing the stairs, putting a gentle hand on Erica’s shoulder as he passed. “I’m going to take Mark with me to the Phoenix prognostication tomorrow, can you show him where we keep those ginger candies? He’s going to need them.” 

Mark darted a snotty look at Divya’s back as he retreated, and Erica tried to study him without seeming too invested as he stood awkwardly in the foyer. She tried to stop seeing him for a second as Mark-the-Asshole-from-her-History-Class for a second, and instead just empathize with him as someone whose entire worldview had been abruptly knocked off kilter. Someone who she actually had a lot in common with, and who she should maybe try and be friends with, especially now that they were going to be forced to work together in the narrow confines of Lethe House. 

“Hey, I can show you where we keep that stuff if you’d like,” she offered, trying to keep her voice light and friendly. 

And then Mark looked up at her from where he’d been studying a photo on the dark, wood-paneled wall of Lethe Alums from years past and said, “Don’t you go to BU?” 

Erica’s jaw clenched tightly together, and she turned and left him at the bottom of the stairs. 

(She heard from Heather Robins in the Phoenix later that Mark had puked all over the floor during the Prognostication, and Erica was not proud of how smug she felt when the next day he came to her with his tail tucked between his legs, shyly asking if she had anything that could help.) 

The summer of Erica’s freshman year at BU, she found out she could take visitor classes at Harvard with professor approval and had signed up for The History of the Occult in America for no other reason than that the course listing sounded interesting. She’d liked the class a lot, though there was a certain Harvard student she could have done without project partnering with, even if it had summoned within her a lot of spite-based motivation for her final project. Smug rebuttal to Mark aside however, Erica had thought it was a good project in its own right, and was predicting that the whole endeavour would have been worth it for the nice little bump to her GPA. 

Which was why she was surprised when a week after the semester ended she was called into her professor’s office with no explanation, her final paper on the desk in front of Dr. Kessler and a man she didn’t recognize sitting in the corner. 

“Um, hi,” Erica said. 

“Erica, thank you so much for coming in,” Dr. Kessler said. “This is President Summers.” 

“Hello Miss Albright,” President Summers said. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with us on such short notice.” 

“Of course,” Erica said, unhappy possibilities starting to pool in the pit of her stomach. 

“President Summers and I were very impressed with your final project,” Dr. Kessler slid Erica’s paper across the desk towards her, but Erica kept her hands in her lap. 

“What brought you to the topic?” Summers asked, leaning forward slightly in his chair, but his voice remained level and detached. “The Harvard Final Clubs as, what did you call them? Ritualistic Occult Societies? What was your inspiration?” 

Erica was 90% sure she was in huge shit, though what exactly that was and why, she couldn’t tell yet. So she wasn’t about to admit that she’d picked Final Clubs based on the paranoid-sounding ramblings of some random bartender for the sake of passive aggressively spiting her former project partner and commit further character assassination. 

“Well,” she said finally, “Final Clubs are sort of. Well they are mysterious, they’re literal secret societies. Everyone talks about them but the people who know what actually happens within them are relatively small. So of course this leads to these sorts of um, conspiracy theories, which I wrote about in my paper.” 

“And this was a conclusion you came to on your own?” Summers asked. 

Erica blinked. “Am I being accused of plagiarism?” 

Dr. Kessler shook her head. “No, of course not, nothing like that.” 

“Did Mark complain about me?” It didn’t really seem like his M.O. but it was a better explanation than anything else she’d come up with. 

“No Erica, you’re not in trouble. In fact, I was very impressed with your work and I shared it with President Summers regarding some potential opportunities here at Harvard, and—”

“Miss Albright, are you in contact with your second cousin Warren Albrecht or any of that branch of your family?” 

Her ribcage shivered under her skin. “I’m sorry,” she started slowly, “I don’t understand.” 

Summers flipped open a file Erica hadn’t even noticed he’d been holding. “You wrote in your paper that for these clubs to function as occult organizations, they would require some sort of external governing body, is that correct?” 

“Well yes, speculatively,” Erica says. “I wasn’t accusing the clubs of _actually_ — ” 

“And you came up with this concept entirely of your own volition? You did not have any contact with your second cousin regarding this matter?” 

“I’ve never even met any of my relatives on that side of my family,” Erica said as Summers stood, flinching backwards slightly into her own chair. 

“Is that a no then?” 

“Yes. Or I mean, no, I didn’t consult with anyone about my— I was just saying hypothetically.” She wanted to ask why the hell they’d looked up her extended family tree, people she didn’t even share a last name with, let alone bounce ideas for school off of, but she didn’t really feel like she was in a position where she could ask questions. It wasn’t even an interrogation so much as an ambush. 

“I was very impressed by your work, Miss Albright,” Summers finally said. “Very impressed.” 

“Thank you?” Erica wondered if she’d stumbled through the looking glass on her way here. People always said that Harvard was its own world, but she never thought they’d meant it like this. 

“Of course,” he continued, “your proposed system of an elected body of Final Club members for internal regulation would never work, too many egos at play, too many opportunities for back door deals. Objectivity is key.” 

“Larry,” Dr. Kessler said. “Let's not split hairs.” 

“Right, right, on to the main point,” Summers said, placing a large hand on the corner of Dr. Kessler’s desk. “Miss Albright, I’d like to offer you a job.” 

“A job?” 

“Yes, a job. As well as a full-ride four year scholarship, room & board, a living stipend, and a guaranteed deposit of $100,000 following the completion of a four-year contract.” 

“I don’t understand,” Erica said slowly. “What kind of job?” 

Summers smiled at her. “You said it yourself. The Final Clubs need an external governing body, and Lethe House would be honoured to have you, Miss Albright.” 

Divya sulks for the entire weekend after Mark dropped the Secret Boyfriend bomb, skittering through the hallways like an unfriendly alley cat. Erica just gives him space and works through her list of monthly Lethe maintenance. Running the house also means managing the inanimate objects inside of it, magical items which need to be replenished, stones which need to be charged in different phases of moonlight, enchanted objects which can go bad like sour cream left in the back of the fridge. In her first year Erica had relied on endless notes and lists from her predecessor, but she feels like she’s finally doing more than just checking a list as she becomes better attuned to the hum of Lethe house and all the magic within its walls. 

Dealing with the animate objects was another matter entirely. 

“I didn’t know it was a secret!” Mark says for what has not been the first and will likely not be the last time as he rocks himself back and forth in Erica’s desk chair. 

“Mhmm you’ve mentioned that,” Erica says, surveying the spread of tarot cards in front of her on her duvet. The Lethe deck needs to be used at least once every fortnight to ensure the most accurate readings possible. 

“Well I’m just saying he doesn’t have to be such an asshole about it.” 

“He’s just freaked out,” Erica says, running her finger along the gilded edges of the Tower card. Chaos, sudden change, revelation. Accurate but not necessarily telling her anything she didn’t know. Hailee, the Oculus before her, had often reminded Erica that tarot was meant to be a conversation and a tool for self reflection, not some kind of soothsaying vending machine that would respond with set predictability to the right combinations. 

Five of Wands, Seven of Cups, Magician Reversed. Erica sighs. At least her reading seems to be accurate if nothing else, and she gathers the cards back into their velvet pouch to be returned under their glass bell jar in the drawing room. 

“You don’t really believe in all that, do you?” Mark asks, knees flexing back and forth as he turns himself lazily in Erica’s chair. 

“All what?” 

Mark gestures at the deck. 

“Oddly judgmental from the guy who can see ghosts.” 

Mark scoffs. “That’s different. Why would a deck of cards know the future? And if they did, wouldn’t the Porcellian be doing this instead?” 

“Different goals need different methods.” 

“I guess, but it’s kind of weird that none of them are really into that,” Mark waves a vague hand. “Crystals and zodiac and tarot and tea leaves stuff. If it worked well they’d all use it.” 

“No one considered telepathy a higher magic until the Delphic merged with the Bee,” Erica says, uncrossing her legs. 

“So?” 

“So. Final Clubs are not the be all and end all of magical potential. I mean, there’s whole entire branches of magic they do at other Ivies we don’t have here. It’s all artificial difference.” That was part of what Erica liked about being Oculus. While Divya and Mark had to run around at the whims of the clubs and their magic forms, Erica was free to deep dive into whatever caught her fancy, so long as it could arguably be beneficial to Lethe. 

Mark’s mouth twists, but he doesn’t argue back, which is a growing improvement over the snotty Harvard freshman she’d met last year. Maybe by the time she graduated she’d have him well trained enough for conversations with the general public. 

“Phoenix prog on Thursday,” she says, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. 

“Hmm,” Mark says with enforced casualty. 

“I wonder if those motion-sickness bands you get for little kids on road trips would help at all,” she muses, feeling more than seeing Mark’s glare at her back. 

“I haven’t even puked since the first time.” 

“Nothing wrong with being prepared.” Erica says. “There’s some interesting new body manipulation magic coming out of Dartmouth we could try out on you.” 

Mark scoffs almost inaudibly, more in the rise and fall of his chest than in the sound it made. “No thanks. I’ve had enough practice being your guinea pig.” 

“Didn’t hear you complaining at the time,” Erica says, pulling her purse off the row of hooks on the back of her door and leafing through the contents. Even pre-Lethe she’d always been the person to carry around safety pins and extra tampons and ibuprofen in her bag, just in case someone needed it. It had been less of a transition than she might have expected, keeping half a dozen vials of poison antidote and a suture kit tucked in beside her wallet. She’d had to upgrade to a bigger bag of course, a decadent mid-tier designer bag that she told her mom she’d gotten a great deal on at a secondhand shop and had sent the actual bill to Lethe. Divya’s eyebrows had jumped judgmentally when she submitted her business expense receipts, but he’d kept his mouth shut. 

That was one thing Erica’s always liked about Divya, his sense of discretion and the feeling that if push came to shove he’d have her back against the clubs or Lethe board or even Summers himself. 

Divya had already been Dante for a year when Summers had plucked Erica out of BU, but he was from a legacy family so his knowledge of the occult was impressively vast, both theoretically and practically. It had been a comfort in that first year of missteps and mistakes knowing that she could lean back on him when the responsibilities of Lethe crested a little too high.

She didn’t think he’d say the same about her, and she knows he wouldn't say the same about Mark. As crazy as it still seemed that uptight, rule-loving Divya had gone running into the arms of a member of the Porcellian, maybe there was something to be said about the appeal of someone he didn’t have to endlessly be on guard for. Who wasn’t relying on him as the last refuge between order and chaos. And who was a tall, rich, crew hunk with supernatural powers, which was the full package if Erica ever saw it. 

“C’mon,” Erica says, slinging her bag over her shoulder, making grabby hands at Mark until he gets up out of her chair, blinking at her like he’s just woken from a deep sleep. 

“Are we going somewhere?” 

“Yeah,” Erica says. “It’s time for you to meet Sean Parker.” 

Three weeks after Divya had dragged Mark Zuckerberg into Lethe House, Erica had been out having a drink with friends when he’d wandered up and out of the crowd. It was important, Divya and Hailee and Marylin had all emphasized, to have friends and hobbies outside of Lethe. So Erica had done her due diligence, kept in touch with her BU friends for regular lunch and coffee dates, joined a study group and went to transfer student mixers at Harvard. She was well aware of the irony that part of her Lethe job was to mix and mingle with the general population, half a reminder of the importance of their work and half a way to displace suspicion, but getting drinks with her friends was hardly a burdensome task. 

“Erica?” Mark said, pushing out of the periphery of the crowd and pushing his hands so far down in the pockets of his hoodie that he was pulling the fabric. “I saw you from— I didn’t know you came here.” 

“First time,” Erica said stiffly, not sure what game he was playing. 

“Great,” Mark said. “That’s great. I’m just here with, well, you know Dustin and— our friend Billy comes here all the time.” 

“Alright.” 

“I just wanted to say hi. And uh. If you need a ride home my friend Chris has a car, so feel free.” 

“Oh, alright. I might,” Erica said, well aware that Mark had somehow slipped between her guards, like trying to catch minnows in the creek. Not prepared for a show of consideration of all things. 

Mark tipped his head at her, hands still balled inside his pockets like they were magnetized to the centre of the earth and then wandered off, the slope of his back not quite blending in to the rest of the crowd.

“What was _that_ about?” her friend Breanne asked, leaning forward on her elbows. 

“Just a guy who lives in my building,” Erica gestured dismissively with her wine glass, knowing she didn’t really have an explanation beyond that, because she had no idea what Mark was playing at. 

Mark still had not apologized to her for anything that had happened that summer in their occult class, and it didn’t really seem like he was going to anytime soon, but Erica was starting to suspect that he at least was trying to show her some gestures of goodwill. Or maybe he was just so terrified of Divya that he’d do anything to be on the good side of someone in Lethe house. 

Either way, she’d taken the ride home. 

Two days later Mark had appeared in the doorway of her bedroom like an apparition. 

“Jesus,” Erica yelped when she finally noticed him lurking, pausing her iPod and pulling off her headphones in an inelegant jerk. 

“I didn’t think that would scare you,” Mark said, and then in the same rush, “What are you doing?” 

Erica looked down at the pliers and spools of wire spread across her desk, the half-finished pendant she was making lying on its side looking sad and abandoned. “It’s part of my Lethe cover, lots of weekends away at craft fairs and stuff. Besides, now no one thinks twice if I have weird shit in my bag.” 

“It’s nice,” Mark offered with the earnest lack of tact of a child presenting their parents with a macaroni-decorated picture frame. Like he knew it was inadequate and wanted her to appreciate it anyways. 

“Can I help you with something?” she tried carefully. 

“Divya said you have the contact book for the other Lethe Houses,” Mark said. “I have to memorize everyone else. For next year.”

Erica blew a stray strand of hair out of her eyes. “Yeah, for sure, I can grab it for you.” 

Mark didn’t move from where he’d planted himself on the threshold of her room as Erica got up and rummaged around on her bookshelf, the leather bound volume half swallowed up by easy read airport non-fiction and textbooks she’d been meaning to sell from last semester and hadn’t gotten around to yet. 

“Divya said if I need another Oculus then I should call Bethany at Princeton,” Mark said when Erica handed the book to him. 

“Of course he fucking did,” Erica scoffed. “You don’t agree?” 

“No, Bethany’s great,” Erica said, “but call Thom at Yale first, unless you also take the Yale-Harvard rivalry way too seriously.” 

Mark leafed through the book idly. “Thomas Edison Baynes?” 

“I know, I know. But he seriously knows his stuff.”

“I thought you’d want me to call your friend first. At Columbia? Aren’t you on the phone with her like, all the time?” 

“Ananka? Further away and less reliable. She gets up to a lot of uh, extracurricular exploits. Call Thom first.” 

“I’ll take your word for it,” Mark said.

“Good,” Erica said, smug that Mark would take her recommendation over Divya’s, which inspired a rare burst of camaraderie in her. “How’s, um, Dante-ing going?” 

Mark exhaled heavily, eyes going comically wide. “Hard. It’s. It’s really fucking hard. Plus, you know, Divya sort of hates me.” 

“He doesn’t hate you,” Erica said. 

“No, I’m just a walking-talking reminder of his failure to exert total control.” 

Erica bit the inside of her cheek. “You know you can alway ask _me_ for help with stuff, right? If I don’t know the answer I can probably help you find answers at least.” 

Mark nodded. “Thanks.” 

“Even though I,” Erica said, the temptation too powerful not to, “only went to lowly old BU.” 

Mark winced and pulled back from her doorframe. “That was. Not my best.” 

“No it wasn’t,” Erica agrees, rocking the half-finished pendant back and forth against the surface of her desk. Waiting. 

“I— I am sorry I said that,” Mark managed after a sizeable pause. “And the other stuff too. When we worked on that project. You were right that I was being an asshole.” 

“I appreciate that,” Erica said, and while it was not exactly the kind of apology that would go down in history books, it’s frankly more than she’d ever expected to get out of Mark. “And while I still stand by my assessment that you were being a pretentious jerk, I can understand better now where you were coming from and why you were so insistently against some of the things I said about ghosts.” 

“Don’t take it personally that I didn’t tell you.” 

“I hadn’t,” Erica said. “And I mean, I wouldn’t have believed you even if you had so. No hard feelings about that part.” 

“Cool,” Mark said, waving the book at her. “Thanks for this. Have fun with your uh, art stuff.” 

“You’re welcome,” Erica said, and she was surprised to find how much she actually meant it, “And Mark if you. Seriously, if you need help with anything, you _can_ ask me. It is my job.” 

“Duly noted,” Mark said, slipping out of her doorway and back across the hall to his Dante quarters. 

The bar Sean Parker worked at was the kind of place you could walk by a thousand times and never realize was there, a simple understated brass plate beside the door the only indicator of the bar’s existence. 

Erica understands the appeal to the regulars, dreams of 1920s speakeasies and the simple thrill of being on the other side of a secret. Mark on the other hand just seems unimpressed as he looks around the tiny alcove that functions as a sort of coat check. 

“Do they card here?” 

“Not if you’re with me,” Erica says, pulling Mark by the wrist past Bobby, who nods her in, pulling back the dark red velvet curtain that separates the waiting area from the bar proper; a low ceilinged and dimly lit place which betrayed nothing of the crisp bright October day outside. 

“Pretentious,” Mark says, in that way that never quite manages to cover the edges of his envy. “Did Lethe set this up? Dark little forgotten corner to hide their shame?” 

“It’s just a bar, Mark,” she says. “He got the job entirely on his own and I come in and check on him from time to time. There’s no big conspiracy.” 

“Except for the part where Lethe kicked him to the curb and covered up that he’d ever been Dante, you mean?” 

“Right, except for that,” Erica agrees airily, setting up at one end of the bar. The place is pretty quiet given that it’s too early for the post-work Happy Hour crowd, but there’s a duo of dark haired girls at the other end of the bar and some guy at a booth with a textbook cracked open in front of him. Not that Erica’s worried about anyone seeing her doing the very mundane and unsuspicious activity of making small talk with a bartender, but given that this is one of her only duties out of the confines of Lethe House, she tends to be a little on the cautious side. 

“Well, well,” Sean Parker says, throwing a towel over his shoulder like a bartender in a college theatre production as he makes his way to them, “If it isn’t my favourite Erica-with-a-c, you want me to get you a Singapore Sling started, gorgeous? You want an order of the rosemary fries too?” 

“Yes to both,” Erica says, flipping over the menu. “Mark do you wanna split something with me?” 

“I— uh,” Mark starts, the skin between his eyebrows puckering into an intense W like she just asked him a particularly difficult brain teaser. “Sure, fine.” 

“Let's do the sesame bread sticks.” 

“You got it,” Sean says, all high-gloss customer service. “What can I get you to drink Mark?” 

The W on his forehead deepens and he darts a glance over at Erica. “Why don’t you surprise him.” 

“A challenge,” Sean says, “I love that. Gimme a quick shake, I’ll get your food order in.” 

Erica taps Mark’s foot with her own the moment Sean is gone. “Are you okay?” 

“I’m fine, why?” 

“Because you’re acting kind of crazy.” 

“His— he’s— ” Mark waves a hand in the air. “His like, _sheen_ is all fucked up.” 

“His sheen?” 

“Like his,” more hand gestures. “His outline is all fucking weird.” 

“You mean like his _aura_?” Erica says, just to bug him, which works beautifully, Mark’s shoulder blades itching together under his hoodie. 

“Fine sure, whatever, his _aura_ , or whatever” Mark snips. “It’s— I’ve never seen one like that.” 

“What does it look like?” Erica asks, genuinely curious. There were a handful of accounts of people who could see ghosts, or Grays as those in Lethe circles called them, without the assistance of elixirs or magical intervention, but Mark’s abilities weren’t quite exactly that. He could see a broad range of interactions with the veil from what Erica had managed to wheedle out of him, but he got so cagey about specifics whenever she asked. Deflecting that she already _had_ all the information she needed through the statements he’d made to Summers. Files which both Erica and Divya had been given free access to. 

According to his statements it was that aura-like outline Mark had relied on to build the Facebook, tracking every single Harvard student who he saw with one and connecting them to the various Final Clubs. But the way he’d described it there had been fairly binary. People either had one, to varying degrees of intensity, or they didn’t. 

Mark licks his lips. “It’s distorted, kind of staticky I guess?” 

Erica itches for the little notebook she kept in her purse to write down these kinds of observations, but she’s pretty sure that would be the exact thing to get Mark to shut down completely in this moment. Besides, a split second later Sean comes bustling over with their drinks and she’s pretty sure taking notes like a tv cop counts as suspicious. 

“Here ya go hot shot,” Sean says sliding a lowball glass towards Mark. “Try that out for speed.” 

“Thanks, wow,” Mark says, blooming strangely under the light of Sean Parker’s attention. He darts a quick glance over to her before taking a sip and nodding at Sean. “It’s um, it’s good.” 

“Bermuda Hundred, my friend,” Sean says, drumming on the counter of the bar enthusiastically. “So what’s the story here?” 

“Just friends, don’t get excited,” Erica says sipping at her drink. No one in her life, with maybe the exception of her mom, has ever been as invested in her love life as Sean. 

“Uh-huh, alright,” Sean says. “But between you and me, Mark, Erica’s never brought anyone along with her before.” 

“Well maybe I just enjoy having your undivided attention to myself,” she quips back easily. Sean is so at ease here and it makes it easy to play along, she tries to imagine him in the cramped hallways of Lethe House, bound up tight with rules. No wonder he couldn’t cut it, poor guy never stood a chance. 

Mark is giving her a weird look she ignores until Sean has shuffled off to help the girls at the other end of the bar. “What?” 

“He doesn’t know who you are.” 

“I— what?” 

“He has no clue who you are. He doesn’t know you’re the Oculus.” 

“No, of course not.” 

“That’s— when you said you were coming to check on him before, I always thought it was like. Being a parole officer or something, making sure he wasn’t going to talk to anyone.” Mark tilts his head, blinks and then looks at her square on. “What did Lethe do to him?” 

Erica puts her drink down, glass slipping slightly in the ring of condensation that had collected on the shiny surface of the bar. “You didn’t think being named after the River Lethe was just a coincidence did you?” 

She watches what she’s just said settle over Mark. “They wiped his memory,” he says finally, with a grim confidence. 

“We are the shepherds,” Erica quotes grimly. “And we are replaceable.” _Even you Mark Zuckerberg,_ she doesn’t say, but she thinks he hears it anyway. 

It’s not like Erica had been planning to sleep with him. 

On a superficial level he wasn’t her usual type. Erica had spent her entire summer of Oculus training trying not to make a fool of herself whenever Hailee’s Lacrosse co-captain boyfriend rolled into the hallowed halls, and while she’d never say it now, especially within earshot of Divya, the Winklevoss twins are, on a purely objective level, totally her type. So Mark was a surprise on several different levels. 

It had been a few weeks after he’d come to her for the contact info for the other Lethe Houses, and without really noticing he’d slowly injected himself into her space until she looked up from some research she’d been doing into new protection spells for the house, and it wasn’t even weird to see him kitty corner across the table from her in the second floor library. She turned a page and watched him for a minute typing away at his laptop with the intense focus of a master concert pianist. 

“Do you need something?” Mark asked. 

“Not unless you know a virgin I could hit up for their blood,” she said, going back to her book. Nothing to remind you you were a cog in an ancient patriarchal machine like the weird over-reliance on virgin blood. 

Mark’s concerto of tapping halted abruptly, and Erica could practically hear the untyped notes hanging in the air. “Why would you ask me that?” 

“Oh it’s— context, sorry,” Erica spluttered, realizing how absolutely insane she must have sounded. “It’s for a protection ritual for the house. Our security hasn’t been updated since the 80s.” 

“And you need virgin blood?” 

“Yeah. The secret societies are freaks about it. I mean honestly I have no idea if it _really_ matters — maybe I should try non-virgin blood on something smaller scale — but with magic this big, I’d rather not mess with it.” 

“And you asked me because…?” Mark prompted. 

“I was just asking,” she said. 

“Okay.” 

“I mean I don’t know, I thought maybe Dustin might be?” 

Mark snorted. “I wish. I’ve walked in on him so many times.” 

“You think you’d learn to knock.” 

“You think he’d learn to lock the door. Or at least put a sock on it.” 

“Ah well,” Erica said, pushing back in her chair. “I’ll figure something out.” 

She went back to the powdery pages of the book, wishing that she’d put gloves on. All of the texts in the Lethe library had special charms on them to prevent decay, but that didn’t stop them from developing that powdery, grimey feel of old paper, especially when they were over a hundred years old. English majors could keep their romanticized old books, Erica was perfectly happy with getting her reading fix clean and hot off the press. 

“I am,” Mark said abruptly. 

Erica looked up. “What?” 

“I am,” he said, lips puckering together self consciously. “A virgin, I mean.” 

“Oh!?” Erica exclaimed, missing impartial by a country mile. 

“Alright don’t be weird about it,” Mark said, going back to his typing. “I just thought you were asking because— if you need blood for something.” 

“Jesus, I’m not _that_ tactless.” 

Mark tilted his head. “You seem surprised.” 

“No shame, I just— ” Erica searched for a nice way to say ‘you seem like the kind of guy who would jump at the chance if someone offered’ but there wasn’t really one, so she settled on, “You have nice bone structure.” 

Mark’s eyes fluttered and he managed to about half-cover the embarrassed but pleased look that crossed his face. Something about it reminded Erica of how Cameron Winklevoss looked when he crossed the threshold back into his body, the slide of tension between the two. 

“Thanks,” he said finally, after a slightly too long pause. 

“You’re welcome,” she said, and let the silence stretch out until it was no longer uncomfortable, starring the top of the page in her notes. 

It had taken her a week to gather the supplies and feel comfortable enough to attempt to draw Mark’s blood. He sat on the edge of the clawfoot bathtub in the bathroom that the Dante and the Oculus shared. It was total bullshit, in her opinion, that the Virgil got a full suite of rooms in the attic, including an en suite, that would sit mostly empty for two years while she shared with Mark. But it was worlds better than the co-ed bathroom situation that had been in her dorm at BU, so she figured she couldn’t complain toomuch. Even if Mark seemed determined to throw his towels at the direction of the hamper instead of into the hamper. 

“Have you ever done this before?” Mark said, bare feet flexing against the ceramic tiles. 

“Uhhhh,” Erica said. “Not technically.” 

“That’s really confidence inspiring.” 

“I got a whole run through and tutorial from Maxfield, it was the best I could do short of sneaking into a nursing lab.” 

“Who’s that.” 

“Maxfield Overstreet? The president of Owl Club?” She leaves the _you should know that_ , unsaid.

“Oh. Him,” Mark made a face. “They’re such freaks.” 

“Owl Club?” Erica asked, rolling out a towel onto the space between the cabinet and the bathtub. Max had suggested that having the subject lie down would be the easiest for her first time, and she’s not about to risk getting Mark’s blood all over her sheets if this goes horribly wrong. Divya had technically given her the green light — not that he could really tell her not to — but she figured doing it where it would be easy to clean up if things went horrifically wrong was the smart move. 

“Yeah,” Mark said disdainfully, pulling his arms out of his hoodie, “it’s so Texas Chainsaw Massacre, if you can do magic without large quantities of blood why wouldn’t you?” The latter half of this is muffled as Mark pulls his hoodie the rest of the way over his head. She expected him to look skinnier, or more frail somehow, but his arms are warm to the touch and lightly dusted with golden hair and freckles. 

“Phoenix is definitely worse though,” Erica said, even though it’s official Lethe protocol to not have opinions about those kinds of things. 

“Debatable. The Phoenix is pretty tidy all things considered. Less unwelcome guests,” Mark said, leaning back onto the towel. “Ugh, it’s damp.” 

“Whose fault is that? Tuck the shower curtain into the tub you heathen.” 

“Really?” Mark asked, blinking up at her, wide blue eyes. 

“Yeah, did no one ever tell you that?” Erica said, kneeling beside him and pulling the tourniquet around his arm. 

“No,” Mark said, a little unnecessarily sullen, as Erica prepped the area and found the vein. “We had an enclosed shower at my parents house and then at the dorms we had stalls. I wasn’t doing it on purpose.” 

“There, there, I forgive you,” Erica said, and before she could overthink it, punctured his skin with the needle the same way Maxfield had shown her. 

“Ow!” Mark hissed, but he didn’t flinch and let her hold him down by the shoulder until all three vials she needed were filled. 

“You should probably go lie down for a little bit,” Erica said once they were done, needle disposed into a biohazards bag and Hello Kitty bandaid on the inside of Mark’s elbow. “You feeling okay? I can bring you a snack or something.” 

“I had a big lunch,” Mark shrugged. “I passed out in high school giving blood and they said it was because I didn’t have enough protein before.” 

“You’ve passed out giving blood before?” 

“Yeah.” 

Erica tilted her head at him. “And you let me, a person who’d never done this before, take your blood on the floor of our bathroom?” 

The corner of Mark’s mouth twitched. “You needed my help. Why wouldn’t I?” 

“I— Okay,” Erica said, somehow more unsettled than comforted with the realization that Mark Zuckerberg was her friend.

At least he started tucking the damn shower curtain into the tub. 

The protection rite goes shockingly well, and Mark reported that the Grays who pass through the square seem not only unable to pass too close to the house, but to be actively repelled by it. 

“Really excellent work Erica,” Divya said when she turned in her report to him. She didn’t have to—as Oculus she reported to the Lethe Board directly—but Divya always asked to read her reports, and she’d never minded. 

Erica spent a good few hours that evening flagging some possible other charms and rites that she suddenly had the missing ingredient for. She lost track of time, and when she finally looked up from her notes she was already past fashionably late for the birthday thing at Mary Elizabeth’s apartment she’d sworn up and down she’d be there for. 

She threw on a different blouse and put her hair up in a lazy ponytail when it became clear there was no saving it. She dug out the single lipstick she owned, a relic from her moody attempts at being alternative in high school and hoped that the jarring boldness of it would save the rest of her outfit. 

“Hey,” Mark said when she came thudding down the stairs. 

“Hey,” she said. 

“Is everything okay?” 

“Yeah, no, no, everything’s fine,” Erica said, pulling her coat off the rack by the door, “I’m just running late for a party thing. I’ve flaked on the last few, so…” 

Mark nodded understandingly, even though he seemed to spend most of his weekends holed up in his room. “I like the— ” he gestured vaguely at his own mouth. 

Erica froze, arm half in her coat sleeve, an absurd idea crossing her mind. “Would you want to come? With me?” 

He got the same startled but flattered look on his face that he had in the library when she’d been surprised at his virginity.

“It’s just going to be a house party, nothing exciting,” she continued when he didn’t say anything. “But there’ll be booze and normal people who haven’t even heard of Final Clubs.” 

“Sure,” Mark said with a nonchalance so forced she had to bite back a response about him needing to make room in his very busy schedule. At least bringing Mark with her let Erica justify the cost of getting a cab to herself, and no one made any snippy responses about her being late, Mary Elizabeth’s birthday cake already mostly picked over in the corner. 

“Albright!” Mary Elizabeth crowed, a little off kilter when she stood from the couch. “Who’s this?” 

“Hi, Happy Birthday,” Erica said, returning her hug, even if Mary Elizabeth was a little gross and sweaty, “This is my friend Mark. Mark, this is Mary Elizabeth.” 

“The birthday girl, I’d heard,” Mark says very seriously. He tilts his head at her. 

“And roooooommate,” Mary Liz drawled. “Speaking of which I think Branigan is around here somewhere, we should get a little reunion pic. Suite 305 for life! Even if you abandoned us for Harvard.” 

Mark touched her between her shoulder blades, “I’m going to go get a drink.” 

“Good luck bubala,” Mary Liz said. “It’s pretty picked over.” And then when Mark was out of ear shot, “Friend?” 

“Yes, shockingly you can make those at Harvard.” 

“Don’t lie to me on my birthday,” she pouted, flopping back onto the couch. 

“Your birthday was on Tuesday.” 

“Don’t lie to me on my birthweek!” 

“Seriously, just a friend.” 

“He’s cute, in kind of a High Risk for Scurvy way.” 

Erica snorted. “Yeah he’s a CS major.” 

“Babes! Why didn’t you tell me, we gotta introduce him to Branigan, you know she gets all hot and bothered for those tech guys.” 

Great, just what Erica needed was Mark getting deflowered by her former roommate. Which yes, okay, maybe it was both a little creepy and a little possessive to guard Mark’s virginity so she could do some weird magic with his blood. But also. She’d watched Erika Branigan go through enough CS boys that she could at least argue to herself that she was potentially protecting Mark.

“Well what if I said he was just a friend but maybe could be more,” Erica countered. 

“Alright Albright!” Mary Liz exclaimed, “I knew it!”

“Okay, okay,” Erica retorted. “Don’t get too excited.” 

But Mary Liz seemed satisfied that she had gotten something out of her attempts at interrogation and dragged Erica into the crowd to schmooze. 

“Here,” Mark said, reappearing at her elbow a while later, Erica camped on the edges of a circle of people. “Try this and tell me if you like it.” 

“What is it?” Erica said, voice raised over the music, not waiting for a response before she took a hesitant sip. Considered, and then took another. “Oh that’s, what is that? That’s nice.” 

“Fireball and Dr. Pepper,” Mark said, leaned down close to her ear. 

“Seriously?” 

“Yeah your friend was right, it was pretty picked over, but we — my roommates — we used to make this all the time and it’s pretty good. Billy got a big bottle of Fireball as an opening night gift so we were always trying out weird combos and this was one of the better ones. I mean, Eduardo didn’t like it, but Wardo drinks like, top shelf shit.”

She tried to pass him back the cup, but Mark shook his head. “Keep it, I’ll go back and make my own.” 

Erica watched the back of his hoodie as he drifted back through the party, the kernel of something sparking in her gut. 

“Why do all your friends call you Albright?” Mark asked later as Erica dug around in her purse on the front step of Lethe for her keys. 

“Oh there were two Ericas in our suite, me and Erika Branigan, so that was just an easier differentiation than being like Erica-with-a-C or Erika-with-a-K all the time.” 

“It sounds cool, like you’re in Top Gun or something.” 

Erica laughed, finally finding her keys. “It’s just my last name.” 

“No, I know. But I like it.” Mark said, inelegantly and a little slurred as he followed into the foyer after her. “It’s cool that you still get to like— see all your old friends.” 

“You don’t see your old friends?” Erica asked cautiously. 

Mark shrugged with one shoulder. “I see Dustin. Chris and Billy, sometimes.” 

“Well I think Mary Liz will probably start asking me for the Mark updates, so you’re, you know, welcome to join us.” 

“Cool,” Mark said, nodding over and over, repetitive and mostly to himself before drifting up the stairs without another word.

Whatever had started to transpire between the two of them, Erica still didn’t understand him. But maybe that was okay. Figuring out their own little system of compromises and exceptions. 

Erica’s notes from earlier were still strewn all over her bed, the familiar sound of Divya pacing back and forth in the attic as she transferred things over to her desk. She was almost done, already laser focused on how quickly she could crawl into her stupidly comfortable stupidly high thread count sheets when something drew her attention. 

An enchantment for creating objects of compulsion which actually hadn’t required virgin blood at all, something she’d shuffled into the reject pile without a second glance. But she could see now why it had turned up in the first place during her research. A terrible idea flagged in the back of her mind as Erica set the enchantment aside and crawled into bed, and before she was asleep the outline of a plan had already formed. 

“Hey, so,” Erica had said two days later as Mark was lying back down on a towel in the bathroom, ready for her to take more blood. The puncture mark under his Hello Kitty bandaid was mostly healed, but Erica had opted to use his other arm just to be safe. 

“I was doing some more research and I think there’s some really exciting and powerful magic we could do with your blood.” 

“Well yeah,” Mark said. “Isn’t that the whole point of— ” he gestured vaguely at her supplies. 

“So the thing is,” Erica said, not looking Mark in the face as she swabbed the inside of his right elbow with rubbing alcohol, “There is a lot of really cool magic we can do with your blood since you’re a — since you’ve never have sex before. Make a fist for me? Great.” 

“But actually,” she continued, getting the needle and her vials ready, “There’s some even more crazy stuff we could do with blood that’s taken um, in the throes.” 

“In the throes?” Mark asked, mouth squishing tight as she slid the needle in. 

“Yeah,” Erica said, well aware that she was very close to him. 

“In the throes,” Mark repeated, and Erica could tell he’d gotten it. “Oh.” 

“Mhmmm.” 

“You want to deflower me so you can do magic?” 

“We don’t have to— ” Erica started, and was cut off by Mark leaning up and kissing her. 

It wasn’t the best kiss ever, but there was an eagerness and earnestness to it that Erica couldn’t deny she enjoyed. 

“To be clear, this is a semi-platonic Lethe beneficial arrangement, Mark.” 

“Obviously,” Mark said, gently pulling at a strand of her hair that had fallen loose from her ponytail. 

“Just so we’re on the same page,” Erica said, pulling off his tourniquet as blood pooled rapidly into the vial. 

Mark is quiet for several blocks after they leave the bar, so Erica opts to take the long way back to Lethe House. 

“How’re you holding up,” Erica asks when they pause at a light, both of them looking and then darting across traffic. When she first moved to Boston she used to actually wait at lights, her roommates laughing at her for being such a stickler about the rules. Erica thought it was more a result of growing up in a place where cars actually went fast and weren’t constantly piled up in traffic. 

“He really doesn’t remember what happened?” Mark says. “A whole year of his life.” 

“More like six and a half months,” Erica says. “Lethe Board ruled to kick him out in January. But they can’t wipe you completely, it’s not safe to. Memory isn’t written in pencil, it’s written in ink. You blot as much as you can and the rest…” He’d mentioned Hailee to Erica before, her Oculus predecessor that Sean claimed to be the fire of his heart during his brief failed stint at Harvard. She had no idea if that was true, or if Sean was scrambling for an explanation for how he had known this girl. Faces and names he couldn’t quite place. 

“How much— ?” 

“Seven percent.” 

Mark exhaled heavily. “Fuck.” 

“Yeah,” 

They walked in silence for a block and a half, Mark dodging out of the way of a group of girls debating loudly where they should get dinner, his shoulder brushing up against Erica’s. 

“If I hadn’t said yes when they— would they have done that to me? Before they expelled me?” 

“I don’t know,” she replies honestly. “Maybe.” 

“Christ,” Mark hisses between clenched teeth. 

“Sean was Marylin’s Dante.” 

“I thought Divya was her Dante.” 

“He is, he was her second attempt.” 

“Second place is second best,” Mark muses. “No wonder he’s got a chip on his shoulder.” 

“He was a safe bet. Legacy family. His grandmother was Oculus here in the 50s.”

“Oh, I know,” Mark says, rolling his shoulders back.

“I’m going to tell Divya what we did.” She pulls her coat collar up and uses Mark’s surprise to put a little bit of distance between them as she crosses the street. He catches up easily enough, arms straight down and legs pumping quickly. 

“Are you like, whatever, delusional?” 

“Mark— ” 

“I thought the whole point of this little Twilight Zone field trip was that Lethe isn’t fucking around here. I have not kept my mouth shut about seeing shit for my whole life to end up— in some shitty little corner spouting conspiracy theories to anyone who pays attention. What the fuck Erica.” 

“Listen,” Erica says. “What Divya is doing is a really big deal. The Board is not going to turn a blind eye if they find out. I don’t think they’d go as far as Sean, but they could if they wanted to.” 

“So we’re all going to keep our mouths shut, and everyone wins.” 

“He’s not going to trust us if he thinks we hold all the cards, so we show him our hand a little, show him we have something to lose too.” 

Mark looks unconvinced. “You are really overlooking the fact that Divya’s going to chomp at the bit to get me thrown out the minute he has dirt on me.” 

“No he’s not,” Erica says. “You’re his Dante, even if he didn’t pick you, your failure is his failure.” 

Mark is quiet in a way that’s so annoyed and sullen she honestly wishes he would just keep arguing back with her. 

“If I could do this without incriminating you, I would,” Erica offers. “But I literally can’t, so can you please just consider it?” 

“You people make no sense.” His hands gesture and swing within the confines of his pockets, and Erica wishes she could take one, but she thinks that really gives off the wrong message. “First we get all these rules, no one talks about them so they don’t seem like a big deal, then you tell me actually they’re a huge deal and Lethe’ll just wipe your whole fucking mind if you don’t comply, and then you try and convince me that telling Divya Narendra, the walking talking Lethe Guidebook, that we hooked up. How the fuck am I supposed to follow any of this?” 

“If Divya thinks there’s even a slight chance of whatever he’s doing with Cameron Winklevoss getting out, he'll go to Lethe Board himself.” 

“Bullshit. He’s not that stupid.” 

“It’s not stupid, it’s a calculated risk. He’s going to fall on the sword and hope they’ll go easy on him because he came forward, and they probably will because they need _someone_ to show you the ropes and there’s no way Marylin is coming back for round three.” 

“This is idiotic,” Mark says. “They’re just...whatever, gazing into each other’s eyes and comparing GPAs.” 

“Not from Summers’ point of view. The Porcellian has had the most fatalities of any club, they _just_ had one in ‘97 and before that in ‘95, and now the Virgil is in a compromised position wherein he might be giving them leeway or preferential treatment.” 

Mark is exasperated. “Divya wouldn’t ever. He slapped them with a fine like last week.” 

“Yeah, _I know_ , but Summers doesn’t know that, Lethe Board doesn’t know that, the other clubs and their very, very, powerful alums don’t know that.” Erica exhales through her nose. “Do you trust me?” 

“In what way?” 

“In general. Do you trust me?” 

Mark considers this with a gravity Erica respects,“I guess, yeah, mostly.” 

“Do you trust me because I’m your Oculus or because I’m your friend?” 

Mark frowns, eyes on the ground and the silence stretches on and on between them until it’s as fine as spidersilk. 

“Okay,” he says right on the threshold of Lethe house. “Don’t fuck it up, Albright.” 

Divya is another matter altogether. 

“I’m going to Head of the Charles tomorrow,” Erica says from where she’d been sitting at the butcher block in the kitchen for the last several hours, waiting for Divya to inevitably emerge. 

“Have fun,” Divya says, cool and detached like liquid mercury. 

“Come with me,” Erica says, shutting her laptop. 

Divya is bent in half peering into the fridge, and he looks at her over the top of the door judgmentally. “That’s not happening.” 

“Thom is going to be there. He’s on as alternate for the Yale team, so you have a completely Lethe sanctioned excuse to go.” 

“You have an interesting concept of what Lethe sanctioned means.” 

“I’m leaving at eight,” Erica says, ignoring him. “So be ready to go then.” 

Divya snorts, coming up with an armful of tupperware containers and gently batting the fridge closed with his foot. “Does that kind of thing work on Mark?” 

“Oh no, Mark requires something much more complicated and subtle.” She reopens her laptop and goes back to her comm homework as Divya noisily bangs around in the cupboard and then the cutlery drawer. 

“Hey,” he says, touching the counter beside her hand gently to get her attention. “You’re a good Oculus. I don’t tell you that enough.” 

“Thank you,” she says hesitantly. 

“Focus on running the house, okay?” Divya says, and then raps twice on the counter like he’s Erica’s mom being superstitious. 

She emails Thom to let him know she’s coming to watch him row ( _I’ll try extra hard to win then! :)_ ) and falls asleep to the sounds of Divya pacing back and forth in his room above her. Maybe she should look into some structural integrity charms before he falls through her ceiling. 

In the morning she thinks about climbing up the creaky wrought iron staircase to knock on his door, but thinks better of it. She has more important things to do than play games with unwilling participants. 

“You said we were leaving at eight,” Divya says from a dark corner of the foyer and Erica startles off the second to last step, catching herself on the banister so she doesn’t go ass over teakettle. 

He holds a finger up. “Don’t say anything, I swear Erica, I will turn around and go back to bed,” he says when she rights herself, which is more than enough confirmation that she looks as smug as she feels. 

“Alright,” Erica says, and lets him follow her. 

“You look like you’re going to the Kentucky Derby,” Divya says. “It’s October.” 

“It’s called personal style, Divya,” Erica says, adjusting the brim of her hat. “Also I couldn’t find my sunglasses.” 

“Mhmm,” Divya hums skeptically, and then falls into a comfortable step with her. It’s early enough on a Saturday that there’s barely anyone around, everything expansive, like Cambridge had exhaled. It won’t stay that way for long, it never does, so Erica tries extra hard to appreciate it. 

“Hey listen,” Erica says, after a minute. “I took Mark to see Sean Parker.” 

“Interesting,” Divya says. 

“He’s not going to tell anyone about you, he gets how serious this is.” 

“He clearly doesn’t.” 

“No,” Erica corrects. “He clearly _didn’t_ so I set him straight.” 

“Well it doesn’t matter now anyways.” 

Erica frowns. “What does that mean?” 

“Nothing, forget it,” Divya huffs. 

“He’s not going to go to Summers, and neither are you.” 

“Last time I checked, you don’t give me orders, Oculus.” 

“Can you stop being pedantic and actually listen to me for thirty seconds,” she finally snaps. “God, you and Mark think you’re like diametric opposites and I swear to god you are two sides of the exact same brick wall.” 

Divya bristles a little at that, which only proves her point. “You’re a good Virgil, and Mark needs you. I need you. The school and the clubs and all the little people who might get caught in the crossfire need you. So any idea you’ve had about going to Summers and throwing yourself at Lethe Board and hoping for the best, get it out of your head right now.” 

“You have no idea how serious this is, Erica.” 

“Actually I do,” she says simply. “Because Mark and I slept together.” 

The calm surface of Divya’s demeanour breaks, ugly and awkward like a stone failed to skip across a lake. 

“You _what_!?” He says, step faltering for just a second before he’s furiously picking up the pace. 

“I slept with— ” 

“I heard you, Christ,” Divya runs a hand through his hair. “You told me you— that you were just ‘project partners.’” 

“No, we were,” Erica clarifies. “This happened after he got punched as Dante.” 

“What. Is _wrong_ with you. At least I had the good sense to start things with Cam _before_ he was in the Porcellian. I have an arguable loophole!” 

“You guys have been together for that long?” 

Divya is breathing so heavily through his nose it’s a wonder he doesn’t have condensation beading on his upper lip. “We are not talking about that. Continue about Mark.” 

“It’s over now, so you can bring this down several notches. It was just so I could get his, god there’s no better way to put this, blood from his deflowering. For magic. For the house.” 

“Christ, okay.” 

“My job is to run the house, I saw an opportunity and I took it. You weren’t complaining when I suddenly had a new batch of compulsion coins ready to go.” 

Divya looks like he’s about to keel over. “So it was just the one time? For enchantment purposes?” 

“Uhhhhhhh.” 

“ _Erica_.”

“It was only three times. Well, okay, three and a half.” 

“What the fuck was the half?” And then when she doesn’t answer, “Erica. What the _fuck_ was the half.” 

“You weren’t supposed to be home for like another hour, it wasn’t our fault,” she argues as maturely as one can argue that her semi-aborted attempts at teaching Mark the finer skills of cunnilingus were destroyed by Divya abruptly arriving back home and immediately requesting her help with locating some basso belladonna. Thank god her comforter was so bulky and Divya hadn’t been looking very closely at the time. 

Divya runs his hands over his face so intensely it looks like it must hurt at least a little bit. “Why are you telling me this? Why the fuck didn’t you keep this to yourself?” 

“Because now you can actually trust us to keep our mouths shut,” she says. “And Mark agreed to let me do this knowing full well he was never your first pick, so maybe have some faith in us for once?” 

He grinds the heels of his palms into his eyes, finally coming to a halt, as if the pure rage driving him forward had finally run out,“You know two incredibly stupid things do not cancel each other out right?” 

“But maybe they could. You’re the math major, figure it out.” 

They stay like that for a little bit, Divya radiating stress. Erica debates if she can pull out her phone to text Thom or if that will come off as incredibly crass. She’s about to do it anyways when Divya finally exhales with the force of someone trying to blow out an entire cake of birthday candles and pulls his spine back up. 

“You know what. Sure. Fine.” 

“Seriously?” 

“Yeah, why not,” Divya says, a little defeated. “It’s not like any of this is going to matter next year anyways. And hey, when has nuclear deterrence ever backfired?”

“There, there,” Erica says, patting him on the shoulder. They’re starting to merge into the crush of people gathering to watch the races, more hats and suits than she’d expected, like the fanciest tailgate in the world. 

“I’ve never been to one of these before,” she says after a minute, something easy for them to talk about.

“Don’t get your hopes up, they're not very exciting.” 

“Do you go much?” 

“Erica.” He gives her a look.

“What? I was just asking an innocent question about your sports attendance. If you chose to read into it a certain way— ” 

“Yes,” Divya says. “I’ve gone once before.” 

“Once?”

“I’m busy. Also don’t get your hopes up, it’s honestly pretty boring.” 

In high school Erica had dated a guy on the boy’s field hockey team named Dakota, and had skipped class multiple times to go to his away games with his number painted on her cheek. Honestly Erica probably would have broken up with him sooner if she hadn’t enjoyed being a Varsity Jacket Girlfriend so much, so she can’t say she’s entirely in tune to Divya’s point of view. She elbows Divya in the ribs when she spots the twins, less noticeable in a crowd of other tall broad crew boys. 

“Which one is he?” Erica says, craning her neck for a better look as she waves. 

One of the twins catches sight of them in the stands and waves back before elbowing his brother. Even from this far away Erica can read the body language, _look who’s here_. The second twin, that _has_ to be Cameron, waves, a little shyer. Divya hesitates for a moment and then waves back. 

“Shut up,” he says, more embarrassed than annoyed. 

“I didn't say anything.” 

“You think loudly, it’s distracting.” 

“He seemed pleased,” she tries and Divya rolls his eyes, pulling out a paperback he’d stashed who knows where, and Erica goes back to surveying the crowd. 

Thom spots her before she spots him, looking oddly gangly beside his broader teammates all in Yale blue, waving both of his arms over his head until she notices and waves back with a laugh. He cups his hands over his mouth and calls something she can’t hear at all, and she gestures back pointing at her ear, _I can’t hear you_. 

He waves her off, _I’ll tell you later_. 

They’ve only met in person once before. The summer Erica had been in training the Lethe general meeting had been held in Cambridge, which had been an oddly lacklustre mix of a business conference and a freshman orientation, right down to the stacks of delivery pizza set up on a table in the corner. Thom had given Erica the last two veggie pizza slices right off his plate when all that had been left had been Hawaiian. (Erica didn’t _really_ keep kosher, but the presence of a literal family member in the room, no matter how distant, had drawn a mental block at the idea of eating bacon.) 

“No, here, seriously, take them,” he’d said, brown eyes very wide and sincere. “I love Hawaiian anyways.” 

She’d called him first from that point forward whenever she had an issue, despite Divya’s muttered comments and general distaste for the Yale chapter of Lethe. 

“Hmm, I see now why you wanted to come,” Divya says wryly. 

“We’re getting lunch after if you want to come.” 

“Lunch or _lunch_?” Divya says. 

“I guess we’ll just have to see.” 

“ _Oculi_ ,” he mutters with the disparaging knowingness of someone who had parents who had both served as Oculus (Columbia and Brown classes of ‘77).

She laughs, leaning into him a little. “You can come and play chaperone if you want.” 

“Oh yeah because that worked out so great with you and Mark— _ow!_ ” 

She lets go of the skin of his arm she’d pinched between her knuckles. “Don’t be rude.” 

“I should probably go find Cameron, you know, after. But make up something that sounds good to tell Thom? Something official Lethe sounding. I swear to god if they get wind of _any_ of this at Yale…” 

“I mean if you’re sure,” she says, doing a frankly terrible job of sounding disappointed. “But I can definitely come up with something.” 

“Thanks,” Divya says, patting her twice on the shoulder in a way Erica can’t help but associate with her childhood soccer coach. “And Erica, just. Be careful, okay?” 

She snorts. “I don’t think I’m the one you need to be worried about.” 

“Just because I don’t doesn’t mean I _won’t_ ,” Divya says, and Erica suspects it came out a lot more vulnerable than he intended, because after a beat he says, “Don’t say anything.”

“I wasn’t going to.” 

“Yes you were,” Divya says, but doesn’t pull away when Erica loops her arm through his, and that’s growth. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> Part III will be up by the end of the week.


	3. Part III: The Dante

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Warning(s): Emetophobia Warning & Mild Gore

_Events where the non-official presence of a Lethe officer is required are few, however, given the necessity of some exceptions, there are no formal sanctions against attending events sponsored by Final Clubs. Lethe officers are encouraged to display extreme discretion regarding non-official attendance. _

_—from, **A Crimson River: Procedures of Lethe at Harvard and Beyond** _

_The problem with trying to regulate almost anything when it comes to Lethe is that those who are punched are, by definition, exceptions to the rule. Over twenty-five thousand people apply to Harvard every year. With Lethe only punching a new Dante once every four years, the odds of getting in are literally 100,000:1. How can we expect them to think they’re anything less than above the rest when they had to defy the odds so dramatically just to get in the door?_

_— from **Lethe Diary of Marylin Delpy, Virgil, Class of 1998 & 2001**. _

_**Part III:** The Dante _

Mark’s mom had always said he was the kind of person that brought out strong emotions in people, which had been her diplomatic response to everything from him getting a suspension in sixth grade for throwing an unopened chocolate pudding at Danny Dallesandro to the time when Mark got dumped by his therapist for the third time in six months.

Even then Mark had known he wasn’t the kind of person who could work a room, who could network and schmooze and walk out of a situation with a handful of business cards and a long list of acquaintances. No, Mark was more the kind of person who could walk into a room and strike up an intense friendship or walk away with a new enemy. 

In hindsight maybe he should have been suspicious when he walked away from the AEPi mixer with not two friends, but with three. Maybe that was a sign that he should have seen this coming.

Especially because Mark has always been good at noticing the things that no one else seemed to. The weird phantom smudges and the glowing halos certain people have around them, the places with strange energy that ripple off of them like a watery mirage off the hot tarmac in August. But more than that Mark has always been good at drawing connections between things, creating a web of information bit by bit until you have something tangible in front of you. It was one of the things he liked about coding, the long game of it, the way you had to pile up the pieces painstakingly to see any kind of picture at all. 

It had only taken him a few months at Harvard to put together that the uptick in people with the distinctive outlines that alluded to some kind of involvement in the uncanny were tied directly to the Final Clubs. He’d been walking back to his dorm freshman year, so late at night it had looped around to being early, shoulders up around his ears because Mark could never be bothered to remember to bring a hat with him. Eduardo had been with him because Eduardo was always with him back then. He’d been the one who’d shown up at Widener and had made Mark save his work and go home so he wouldn’t pass out in a library cubicle. 

The group would have drawn his attention anyways given that most of them were in various states of undress, but it wasn’t the half naked guys on the yard that really drew his attention. 

“What the fuck,” Mark heard himself say. 

“Oh, geez,” Eduardo replied, following Mark’s eyeline, wincing in sympathy as one of the half undressed guys was forced down onto his knees into the snow by two upperclassmen, a third dumping a cooler of ice water over the poor guy’s head. “I know the connections you make in Final Clubs are supposed to be unreal, but that seems so not worth it.” 

Mark was only half listening, straining to try and keep them all in his sightline as Eduardo tried to keep him on pace back to his dorm. He’d never seen that many people with outlines— well, ever. 

“Mark?” Eduardo said, in the well worn way he did when he’d already said it two or three times before. 

“What did you just say they were?” 

“Huh?” 

“Which Final Club?” 

Eduardo cocked his head. “Dunno. Maybe the Fox? I’ve heard their punch process is brutal.” 

Someone else was being pushed into the snow now, and Mark could make out the faint mocking scolding of one of the fully dressed upperclassmen. 

Eduardo put an arm around Mark’s shoulders, steering him more firmly now. “C’mon it’s late, it’s cold, I want to go to bed.” 

“I didn’t ask you to come get me,” Mark pointed out, not to be rude, but just because it was true. 

“Yeah well, who else is going to keep your dumb ass on track?” Wardo said, because he had a weird thing about playing mentor-slash-big brother like he was ten year’s Mark’s senior and not a whole eleven months older than him. 

Mark had let Eduardo guide him away and drop him off at his dorm (Eduardo’s own a five minute walk the other direction), but he hadn’t gone to bed, firing up his VAIO and trying to scrounge together everything he could on the Final Clubs. It was around nine when his eyes started burning so badly that Mark was forced to finally go to sleep just as Dustin groaned and rolled over, smacking his lips together like a little kid as he woke up. 

Mark had made peace years ago with the fact that there might be no one — not a doctor or a specialist or a rabbi or a conspiracy theorist — who could tell him what the fuck he could see that no one else could. And after ten years of eye doctors turned psychoanalysts Mark had decided to shut up and stop trying. But literally overnight the tantalizing possibility of answers had been dangled in front of him, and he wasn’t going to let that slip past him without a fight. 

So really, he should have been happy when, almost exactly one year to the day, Eduardo had gotten punched by the Phoenix. 

“I’ll tell you everything,” Eduardo said, flipping his embossed envelope back and forth in his hands,“I mean if you— if you want.” 

Mark shrugged, not trusting that his voice wouldn’t betray him. His voice is not what he should have been worried about. 

Sean Parker has disappeared somewhere into the back of the bar when Erica clears her throat and excuses herself to the restroom. Mark’s still sipping at the watered down version of whatever it was Sean had made him when very suddenly the two dark haired girls from the end of the bar are right in front of him. 

“You’re Mark Zuckerberg,” the closer one says, with a level of confidence that stops it from being a question. 

“You’re in the Fly,” Mark says back, just as easily. He scrambles for a name, but all he remembers is the sharpness of her middle part and the curtain of her dark hair shading to the left of The Fly’s president during their most recent Thursday night venture.

“Christy Lee,” She offers. “And this is Alice. I’m the social chair.” 

“That must be a busy job,” Mark says evenly. The Fly specialized in mirror charms and emotional magic. Parties were sort of their thing. He hedges a glance to where Sean had retreated into the backroom, Mark didn’t know enough of the details to know if crashing Fly parties was what had gotten him thrown out of Lethe, but given their reputation it wasn’t a bad guess. 

“I manage,” Christy says. “Where’s Divya? Not invited?” 

“The Virgil never rests,” Mark says, doing a below average job of keeping the bitterness out of his voice. It was no secret that the Final Club members all preferred Divya to him, and not just because he’d exposed them all with the Facebook. Divya just had this ability to interact with club members with the perfect air of social nicety that said, ‘oh if only we were not bound by professional protocol, we could be the best of friends.’ As if Divya wasn’t rolling his eyes and judging them behind their backs as much as Mark did. Maybe even more. 

“You’re not special, I got it too when Marylin left,” Divya had reasoned when Mark had ground his teeth a little too hard at being referred to as ‘The New Divya’ for the fourth week in a row. 

“Can the House of Lethe help you with anything?” Mark says, keeping his voice down. 

“No actually,” Christy says. “But the Fly Club wanted to extend you an invitation. We’re having a small gathering Saturday. You should come.” 

Mark’s not sure if it’s worse Lethe protocol to immediately say no like the upstanding member he’s kind of pretending to be, or if he’s supposed to play coy like he might accept out of politeness. 

“Just think about it,” Christy says, answering for him. From behind her, Alice produces a card from literal thin air, a small rounded square on thick paper like a paint chip. At first Mark thinks it’s blank, but when he takes it from her he catches the Fly logo embossed on it in shiny black. 

“Just show it at the door,” Alice says. “Don’t show up too late though,” Christy cautions, her fingernails flashing deep red as she puts a hand on the counter. “We invited the Phoenix and we have a cap on attendees.” 

“The Phoenix?” Mark says too quickly, and before he can even hope that they didn’t catch his eagerness, Christy grins. 

“Mhmm, should be lots of interesting people there.” 

“I’ll think about it,” Mark says, holding the card between the pinched knuckles of his index and pointer finger. If he was the Dante that Divya wanted him to be he’d tear it up the moment that Christy and Alice turn to go, heels clicking on the smooth hard floor of the bar, but Mark’s definitely not that, so he slips the card into the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie. 

“Do you know those girls?” Sean says, drawing Mark’s attention. 

Mark shrugs. “Not really.” 

Sean crosses past Mark, leaning over the bar to watch them go, before turning back to Mark, eyes intense and tone low. “Good, that’s... good. Don’t get to know them. Between you and me Marky Mark, those Final Clubs, they’re bad business.” 

Mark squints. “How did you know they’re in a Final Club?” He’s seen soap operas, he knows all it takes is one small crack in someone’s supposed erased memory to bring everything forward in a flood. 

“You can always tell,” Sean says, voice getting lower and sharper. “Probably Fly Club if their IDs were anything to go by. They make these— I don’t know how they do them, they're perfect but they’re Wrong. They’re not fakes like I’ve ever seen, I can always tell that they’re fake but— they don’t.” 

All that power and Fly club was still using it to crank out fakes. College is still college no matter how you dress it up. Mark hadn’t realized that last year, the ways in which being in a Final Club, despite all their immense power and influence, was at the end of the day about separating the haves from the have nots. It didn’t matter that the Final Clubs were powerful enough that they could do whatever they wanted — within Lethe approved reason — because they didn’t want answers, didn’t want to change the world, they just wanted to be in the inner circle. 

“Mark,” Sean says. “Are you listening?” 

“Sorry, I was uh, looking at the uh, architecture,” Mark says lamely, and Sean smiles like he knows Mark is lying. 

“Don’t buy into their bullshit.” 

Mark snorts. “I don’t.” 

“Yeah you do,” Sean says insistently, eyes going wild. “That’s what they do, Mark. they take a smart guy like you or like me and they— they do shit, okay? Like really powerful dangerous crazy shit. Shit you don’t want to get caught on the other end of.” 

“Like what?” 

“Like,” Sean says, hands grabbing at the edge of the bar, voice low and serious, “I can’t prove it but I know they tap my phones. Whatever it is that’s gonna trip you up, you’ve done already. And it’s all there, somewhere and someone doesn’t want it to get out. Because they know I’ll sound crazy if I tell people so they made so I can’t— so I’ll sound crazy. But they’re the crazy ones they’re _fucked up,_ Mark, okay. Okay?” 

“O-kay,” Mark agrees, because Sean is very, very close to him and while Mark has about four Lethe approved methods of self defense on his person (yes, he does actually listen sometimes, _Divya_ ), he’d rather not have it come to that. But Sean seems appeased, pulling back suddenly and slipping so quickly back into his smooth customer attending persona with a self conscious little laugh. “Here, let me cash you guys out,” he says, turning away as Mark throws back the last of his drink, ready to be gone already. 

“What took so long?” Mark hisses when Erica returns from the bathroom, adjusting her bag off her shoulder. 

“Sorry, I’m on my period, I had to wash my menstrual cup if you must know.” 

Mark tries hard not to make a face. Not hard enough. 

“Oh my god, grow up,” Erica says. “If you can fool around with a girl on her period you can hear about it in a non-sexual context. Besides, you asked.” 

“I didn’t say anything!” 

“You made a face,” Erica says, not looking as she digs out a handful of cash from her wallet. 

“Do you really need change?” Mark snaps. 

He expects Erica to snap at him but she just gives him a once over and says, “That bad?” 

“Yeah, that bad.” 

“Okay,” she says, grabbing him by the elbow and putting the cash down on the bar. “We can go.” 

Mark had met the Winklevoss twins his first actual week of being Dante. He’d technically already been Dante for a few months at that point, but all that had really meant was having a lot of magically-binding contracts shoved at him while he was left to his own devices to read through two dozen books that were considered ‘essential reading’ for all Lethe punches. He’d also had to go to the conference at UPenn, which mostly involved Marylin aggressively taking him under her wing and shuttling him from panel to panel, quitely explaining things to him under her breath. Officially it should have been Divya who was doing this kind of thing as his Virgil, but Divya had spent the entire conference looking sullen between his two Oculus parents, like a perfect overlap of their venn diagram. 

In hindsight Mark kind of liked it better when Divya had wanted nothing to do with him, because at least then he wasn’t pinned down by the crushing weight and white-hot concentration of Divya in full Virgil mode. The bars Mark was expected to clear were many and they were high, with piles and piles of Lethe regulations and notes on the various clubs that appeared in his room faster than Mark could read them. While everyone else was enjoying the write-off of syllabus week he was frantically preparing for the world’s worst and hardest on-campus job. 

“Did you read the files?” Divya said, in lieu of any sort of greeting (and people thought _he_ was rude) right as Mark had shoved half of a chocolate chip bagel in his mouth. Divya sighed like his life was very difficult and actually checked his watch while Mark tried to chew frantically. 

When he managed to clear his windpipe enough so he wouldn’t literally choke on his words, Mark nodded and said, “Yeah, I’m all up and up on our local cryptids.” 

“Wow, it’s statements like that that really inspire great confidence in me. Don’t say shit like that in front of the subjects.” 

“Nothing dehumanizing about _that_ turn of phrase though,” Mark said under his breath. 

“Just be ready at eleven, alright?” 

“Yes sir,” Mark said, mouth full and went back to his readings. 

At first he’d thought Lethe’s staunch refusal to digitize anything was a weird flavour of luddite elitism, but it seemed to be at least partially more complicated than that. The House of Lethe was nothing if not paranoid, which meant documents that were impossible to transcribe elsewhere or turned to incomprehensible blurs if not held under moonlight or whatever stupid charm the author had decided on, were largely the norm. Not that Mark was about to turn around and offer his databasing services to the same assholes that had tried to get him thrown out of Harvard (and only let him come back by blackmailing him into their service). 

As it was, Mark was trying to make his way as quickly as possible through the last of his Phoenix prep documents — a crystal clutched tightly in one hand so he could actually read the stupid things — when the Winklevoss twins had appeared in the foyer. It seemed almost impossible that two people that large could have snuck up on him, but one moment he was sitting alone trying desperately not to imagine Eduardo’s face on the body of these nameless Phoenix members, and the next he was face to face with the genetic equivalent of crossing an Abercrombie model with a lumberjack and then cloning him. 

“Hi,” one of the twins said. “We’re a bit early, forgive us.” 

“You must be Mark Zuckerberg,” the other said, managing to make Mark’s name sound exactly like _‘that asshole_. _’_

“Hey,” Divya said, coming down the stairs and giving the twins one of those familiar bro nods. 

“Hey man,” the second twin said, rolling his shoulders under his Patriots hoodie that even Mark thought could use a good run through the wash. And Mark couldn’t even remember the last time he did laundry. “This is the new you, huh?” Twin #2 said, like Mark wasn’t even fucking sitting there, shoving his Phoenix notes under the bench he was sitting on. 

“Well, that’s the theory,” Divya said. “Mark, this is Tyler,” he gestured at hoodie, “and Cameron Winklevoss,” the polite one nods at him. Well, polite-er. 

“So what’s the trick?” Mark said. 

“Hmm?” Cameron asked, eyebrows shooting up into his boyband hair. 

“Isn’t there always a trick to tell twins apart?” Mark retorted. 

“Well there’s _this_ ,” Cameron said evenly, and then— 

Mark has been able to see— whatever it is that he sees, the halo outlines around other people and the vague smudges that he’d always considered himself too rational to think of as ghosts — for literally his entire life. He can’t remember a time when walking through a public place didn’t involve dodging around at least one lingering floating smudge (Grays, he was supposed to call them Grays now), so he was not exactly a stranger to weird supernatural bullshit, even before Lethe grabbed him by his ankles and dragged him into the deep end. 

But none of that prepared him to watch Cameron Winklevoss detach himself from his body, not like a snake shedding it’s skin or like someone walking through a door, but like crappy special effects from a 60s sci-fi movie. One moment he was standing there like a normal person, the next, so abrupt that it felt like it needed a little _pop!_ teleportation sound effect, there was Cameron’s body, and then there was Cameron in all his blurry lens flare glory. Mark wasn’t necessarily expecting him to look like the smudged outlines of Grays, or like a cartoon ghost, but he wasn’t expecting something that hurt so much to look at, and he averted his eyes. 

“And that’s how you tell us apart,” Tyler said out of his own mouth and his brother’s simultaneously, which caused goosebumps to erupt along the back of Mark’s neck. 

It’s over soon at least, Cameron settled back into his body with the same abruptness he’d left, followed by Divya asking a few cursory follow up questions that quickly turned into general familiar small talk. Other than the unsettling obvious, it was becoming quickly apparent to Mark that another way to tell the twins apart was their relationship with Divya. The easy ebb and flow he seemed to have with Tyler compared to Cameron, who made a lot of polite smiles and nods of listening, but who seemed largely uninterested in their conversation. Not that it really mattered, Divya couldn’t be friends with either of them in any meaningful way as Virgil, and the twins seemed more or less aware of that, leaving with a polite detachment the moment Divya flipped the switch of professionalism. 

“It was great to meet you Mark,” Cameron said as he left, so earnest that Mark didn’t trust him on principle. “I hope you settle in well, you’re in very capable hands.” 

By comparison it should have been a significant improvement to see Dustin, but the upswing of a familiar face was largely undercut by the fact that Mark hadn’t seen Dustin since the Facebook aftermath when he’d been kicked out of dorms for his expulsion hearings turned job recruitment. It also did not help that since Mark’s expulsion had seemed, at the time, a more or less done deal, he’d had to drop off the lease for a three bedroom place he was supposed to share with Chris and Dustin, which Eduardo had oh-so-magnanimously rushed in to fill. So seeing Dustin, and knowing that he would have been in the exact same place sharing space with Eduardo right before he’d arrived at Lethe was just another reminder that Mark was going to have to do the same in a very short span of time. 

Oh also finding out exactly what Dustin had meant when he’d said “I can turn myself into a horrifying shadow monster,” in response to Mark’s ironic invoking of the phrase “I can see dead people” was also a pretty big deal. 

“It’s a family curse. First born son, blah blah blah. It’s not really that big of a deal,” Dustin said with a big overzealous shrug before he’d backed into a shadow of the foyer and morphed into some _thing_ ; seven feet tall with horribly gangly unhuman limbs, gashes of void where its eyes should have been, and Mark fought the urge to flinch back when it moved forward and became Dustin again. 

“Yeah, freaky right?” Dustin said unbothered. 

Divya looked over at Mark, eyebrow raised, like Mark was responsible for this somehow just because he and Dustin had cohabitated for eight months. 

“Mark, you wanna run through the checklist?” Divya asked-slash-demanded. 

“I guess,” Mark said, pulling out the scrap of paper he’d written them down on earlier. Nothing particularly interesting, this was just meant to be a check-in, and Divya hadn’t actually told him what he was meant to _do_ if one of Harvard’s more unique members of the campus community required, like, actual Lethe aid. In the short term, the answer was probably ‘come get me,’ but that didn’t help do anything to make the glaring future of Mark trying to handle all this bullshit _alone_ any less daunting. 

It didn’t take long for Mark to run through the questions, a lot of simple yes or no answers. Have you noticed anything different with your abilities lately? Are you concerned you may be a danger to yourself or others? Who around you is aware of your abilities? 

“No. No. And uh,” Dustin scratched the back of his neck in a way that was so obvious that Mark didn’t even need him to finish. 

“Wardo, right?” Mark said. 

Dustin nodded, hand still on the back of his neck. He was easy to underestimate in the same way that Eduardo was. Because they were sweet and a little goofy which put people at ease and endeared them at the same time. And they were both smart enough to be aware of that fact and use it to their advantage. 

“How’s the new place,” Mark said, talking around the wad of jealousy in his mouth, like trying to chew an entire pack of gum at once. 

“It’s cool! It’s nice. Well,” he flip-flopped a hand, “it’s mostly nice. We have black mold in the shower and our landlord already hates us. But you know, that’s just the student _life_ mi amour.” 

“Uh huh,” Mark said. 

“You should come by sometime,” Dustin said. “Seriously, I can barely sleep at night without your horrible little modem lights and all the clicking. Plus, maybe having house guests would encourage Chris to _actually_ do his gross grody dishes and not leave them in the sink for like, a week and a half.” 

“Do you remember that chinese takeout container he left in the back of the fridge at Kirkland? The soup mold brick?” 

“Don’t remind me, I still have nightmares about that thing!” Dustin clutched a melodramatic hand to his chest and then sombered a little. “Maybe just uh, maybe give us a heads up if you’re dropping by. You know so we can— if Wardo wants to— you know…” 

“Got it,” Mark said stiffly. 

“Just you know, maybe text me first or whatever,” Dustin said with a shrug, that tried and failed to return the moment to the brief snapshot of normalcy they’d had seconds before. Which was stupid. Nothing was ever going to be normal again, not since the moment Mark had published the Facebook. Maybe even before then too, when he’d pulled Eduardo aside in a last ditch effort to save their friendship, when he confessed what he hadn’t told another person in _years_ and watched as Eduardo spit it back in his face. 

Or maybe someone like Mark could never be normal to begin with. That years of flying under the radar had tricked him into thinking there was a version of this where he didn’t end up on either side of Lethe’s questions. Where he and Eduardo were still on the same side. 

He was hazy and out of it for the other three persons of interest, a psychic sophomore named Ian who deadpanned his way through identifying a pack of playing cards, a natural-born telepath member of the Delphic named KC who left Mark on edge and mentally singing any boyband earworm that sprung to mind, and some guy named Stuart Singer who Mark could not be bothered to retain any additional information about. 

“Mark,” Divya snapped, bringing Mark back into focus. “You know, in my experience, listening and paying attention are sort of cornerstones of this position. But hey, maybe staring at the stuff on the walls instead will be instrumental to your process.” 

“You never know,” Mark said. “Aren’t I supposed to be all brushed up on Lethe history anyways? Besides, have you ever really looked at some of these pictures?” He pointed to roughly where he’d been zoning out. “See, like that girl’s a total babe. I bet you’ve never even noticed that.” 

“That’s my grandmother.” 

Mark’s head snapped like he’d been slapped. “No she’s not.” 

“Yeah she is. Divina Fiore, Oculus, graduating class of 1959. I’m literally named after her.” 

“Both of your parents _and_ your grandmother were Oculuses?” 

“Oculii. And yes, I’m a third generation.” 

Well that explained a lot then. “Huh, I guess you got her jawline. And she is still kinda hot. No offense or whatever.” 

Divya still looked unimpressed, but Mark had thrown him off enough that he didn’t have much of a comeback, he just drew in a sort of incredulous breath and said, “Be ready to leave at 7:30,” muttering something to himself in what Mark was fairly certain was Italian as he tromped up to his room. 

Mark flipped through his Phoenix notes listlessly. He needed to prepare more, but seeing Dustin had rattled him in a way he didn’t have the proper vocabulary for. Somehow the idea of doing this, of being the Dante, it had all seemed somewhat doable when the people he was going to have to deal with were just trust fund weirdos and overzealous self-righteous Lethe members. Having to crush that together with his old life made everything behind Mark’s rib cage go tight and rubbery. 

_See Erica about GINGER CANDIES_ was scrawled at the top of the packet in Divya’s spikey handwriting, underlined twice. Mark was shocked that Divya drew the line there and hadn’t patronizingly highlighted the whole thing. And besides, none of that was going to stop Mark from ignoring it all together. He had a pretty strong stomach and had never had much of an aversion to gore, happy to eat pizza alongside Chris’s slasher movie pick of the week and helping himself to Billy and Dustin’s discarded slices. He really didn’t see how this would be that much worse. 

Besides, the idea of having to go asking Erica for her help was way more off-putting than the vague, hypothetical threat of vomit. 

Erica’s gone on Saturday when Mark wakes up, lying in bed for way too long until he feels all grimey and reluctantly drags himself into the shower (tucking in the curtain thank you _very_ much, he can learn when he’s actually, you know, given instruction). The house is uncomfortably quiet without the sounds of Erica laughing on the phone through his wall or Divya’s relentless pacing above him in his study. 

It’s almost three o’clock, when it becomes clear that wherever Erica and Divya have slipped off to, they're not rushing back any time soon. Which, with the news Erica was planning on delivering, could be a very good thing or a very bad thing. Mark resigns himself to making his own lunch and hoping that Erica’s plan hasn’t totally backfired. 

He’s never been sure if Erica always having some meals he and Divya were welcome to in the fridge was part of her Oculus job, or just something she did to be nice, but either way there’s nothing in there now. Not that he expects to be waited on hand and foot, his parents did actually raise him right, but two years of dorm living have left him with a shockingly sparse cooking repertoire. 

He’s halfway through making himself a grilled cheese that will hopefully only be burnt on one side when he hears the front door open. Mark’s annoyed at the rush of excitement that hits him, like he’s a puppy left alone all day, jumping at the shins of his owners for attention. 

“Hey,” Mark calls over his shoulder, not willing to sacrifice the other side of his sandwich. 

“Hey!” Erica’s voice calls, and then, with a mix of bemusement and hesitancy, “Are you cooking?” 

“Yeah,” he calls back, trying and mostly failing to keep a sullen edge out of his voice. 

Erica laughs and then there’s another voice from the foyer, deeper and male but distinctly not Divya’s. 

“Erica?” Mark calls again, ignoring the alarm bells going off in his head. “Who’s here?” 

“One second, one sec,” Erica calls and then there’s more clattering and muttering. Mark resists the urge to lean out of the entryway of the kitchen like a nosy mother who can’t handle her daughter bringing a boy home after school. But it’s not like Erica would be bringing any random somebody to Lethe, and Mark stands firm watching the other side of his grilled cheese burn while he forces himself not to turn around until he hears her come into the kitchen. Child logic: if I can’t see you, you can’t see me. 

“Whoa, high fired,” Erica says. She’s wearing a big floppy hat and swats him in the shoulder playfully. Which, she wouldn’t do that if they were actually in trouble, right? 

“I like it that way,” Mark lies and transfers the cremated remains of his sandwich onto a plate. 

“Well if you want it, I have leftovers from lunch,” Erica says, and pats him on the arm, leaning in close to whisper, “be nice!” into his ear, before spinning him around to face the mystery guy. 

“Thom, this is Mark, our Dante,” Erica says. “Mark, Thom is the Oculus at Yale.” Thom is a tall, brown-skinned guy with short cropped curls in a varsity jacket, a stylish backpack that makes Mark think of Chris slung over one shoulder. 

“Thomas Edison. Right. Are we, like, being audited or something,” Mark says, not entirely willing to go off guard. 

“Ah, nothing like that,” Thom says. “I was just here for the race and thought I’d pop in, you know, say hi.” 

“Race?” Mark asks Erica. 

She nods. “Thom rows crew.” 

God, cause that’s the last thing they need, another tall arguably handsome guy who rows crew between occult activities.

“We were going to go check out that new exhibition at the Peabody,” Erica says. “Thom is big into Mesoamerican textiles.” 

“Well who isn’t!” Mark says with feigned delight that earns him an elbow in the ribs from Erica, and which settles why exactly this Lethe dude is here. It’s not to throw them to the mercy of the Lethe board, it’s to try and get into Erica’s pants. 

“You’re totally welcome to tag along,” Thom says, with a genuineness that makes Mark seasick for Eduardo, even as Erica gives him a distinct _I’d rather if you didn’t_ glance. 

“Nah, I’ve got plans,” Mark shrugs. 

“Nice!” Erica says, a little too eager. “What’s up?” 

Mark hasn’t formulated anything, so he’s relieved when he finds an answer waiting for him at the tip of his fingers. “Going to hang out with Dustin and Chris. Movies. Video games. Alarming amounts of Mountain Dew.” 

“That sounds _so_ fun,” Erica says, a little too earnest and Mark can’t even begrudge her for getting so thoroughly over him with enviable ease. Well okay, he can mostly not begrudge her, he’s not a saint. 

And it’s not like he was _that_ hung up on her or anything, what is life but a series of meetings and partings or whatever. It’s just scary, the way it never _stops_. For so long Mark’s lived his life centred around the universal constant of a secret he couldn’t tell anyone. But popping that bubble seemed to have shattered the idea of any universal constant entirely. 

“I’m actually going to run upstairs and change really quick,” Erica says, eyes darting between Mark and Thom. “You guys entertain each other for five minutes?” 

“I will try my hardest,” Thom says, crossing over his heart, and Erica bumps him with her hip on her way out of the kitchen. So at least the pants-getting-into seems mutual. 

“You’re a C.S. major, right?” Thom says, when the sound of the stairs creaking dies out. 

“Mhmm,” Mark says, he wishes he had something to do other than pretend to eat his inedible grilled cheese. 

“That’s awesome, it’s cool to see Harvard embracing some more non-traditional Lethe majors. I swear our board practically threw a fit that I was, horror of horrors, a modern language major.” 

“Oh. Uh. That’s...cool. Which ones?” Look, he’s trying, okay? 

“Ah, Spanish and Portugeuse,” Thom says, rolling his shoulders. “Which is maybe a bit of a cop out because my mom’s from Brazil so I spoke it pretty regularly growing up. But the Spanish is new! And it’s nice not having to look at Greek and Latin _all_ day long, you know?” 

Mark nods, because it feels like the thing he’s supposed to be doing. “I have a— ” friend? Ex-friend? Best friend? Nemesis? “I uh, know a guy who’s Brazillian,” Mark lands on finally, lamely. But Thom nods and grins at him like Mark has said something very insightful. 

“Oh here,” Thom says. “Before I forget, let me hand these over to you.” He slings his bag off his shoulders, setting it onto the counter and rummaging around for a moment before coming up with a small velvet drawstring bag. “Courtesy of our peers at Scroll & Key.” 

“Portal stuff?” Mark asks, accepting it when Thom hands it over, lighter than he’d expected. He still has his plate in hand, so he shoves the bag into his hoodie pocket for safekeeping. 

“Mhmm,” Thom says. “Erica said you guys were running low so I called in a few favours.” 

“Well. Thanks.” Mark says, shoving the bag into the pocket of his hoodie and then scrambles to think of a single interesting thing to say for a good forty-five seconds before the sound of Erica at the top of the stairs puts him out of his misery. 

“Okay, okay,” she calls, voice arriving before she does in the doorway of the kitchen. “You ready to jet?” 

“Oh I was born ready,” Thom says, clutching at the straps of his backpack and looking like an overgrown middle schooler as he grins down at Erica. 

Now that they’re finally looking at each other and not him, Mark shoves his grilled cheese onto the counter behind him. The moment they’re gone he’s eating those leftovers. 

“You all good to hold down the fort?” Erica says. “Don’t need anything from me?” 

She’s wearing the same dark lipstick she’d worn to her roommate’s birthday party and she’s got one of the pendants she made on a long gold chain. She looks pretty and Mark feels a rush of affection. It’s a weird feeling, Mark thinks, to look at someone and know there’s probably some parallel dimension where you’re in love with them, and to be totally okay with that dimension not being this one. 

“Yeah, I’m good.” 

“Great, great,” Erica says. “And hey, Mary Liz invited me for drinks later, so we were gonna head over to her place around, what, maybe nine? If you’re done with your friends you should swing by.” Mark shrugs in response, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants. 

“Well hey, good to meet you Mark.” Thom offers good-naturedly, and then to Erica, “I’m gonna get a head start, those boots take a million years to lace up.” 

“But so worth it,” Erica grins.

“See you later maybe?” Thom offers to Mark, who nods in return. He’s aiming for that nonchalant bro nod. He can’t see his own reflection, but he doesn’t feel like he succeeded. 

“Hey, seriously,” Erica says once Thom has politely nipped into the foyer. “That’s a serious offer. Mary Liz brought you up by name and told me to invite you.” 

“I don’t wanna crash your date.” 

“The museum trip is the date part, tonight is just gonna be a friend thing. You should come. It would take a lot of pressure off of my friends interrogating Thom.” 

Mark already knows he probably won’t, the outline of a plan forming. “Maybe. I’ve got stuff.” 

“Sure, sure,” Erica says. “Text me though and I’ll send you the address.” 

“Hey,” he says, voice dropping. “What happened with Divya?”

Erica grins, self-satisfied. “He’s off with Cameron. No idea if or when he’ll be back.” 

“Seriously?” 

“What can I say,” Erica shrugs. “I’m a meddler, I love to meddle.”

“And…?” 

“And what?” 

Mark blinks, feeling outside of the joke. “What did he say when you told him about…?” he gestures frantically between the two of them. 

“Oh right. _That_.” 

“Yeah, _that_.” 

“Don’t get all sullen,” Erica says. “It’s been a long morning, do you know how early these races are? No he— I mean he freaked out a little, but I talked him off the ledge and then he went off with Mister Man. Everything’s fine. I told you. We have each other’s backs and everybody wins.” 

Mark waits for ten minutes after Erica leaves with Thom-from-Yale before he calls Dustin from the heavy, wall-mounted phone in the kitchen. It's not like it would look incriminating, but he needs the time to clear his head, keep the excited shake out of his voice. Now that he knows he's off the hook with Divya, the only thing that had stopped him from being one-hundred percent certain that he was going to the Fly tonight for that party was not having a way to guarantee that Eduardo would even show. 

Only actually, he does. He's had one this whole time.

“Y'ello?” Dustin says when he picks up after two rings.

“Hey,” Mark says, and then when the line lags. “It's Mark.”

“Oh hey man,” Dustin says. “Sorry, this phone is _garbage._ I didn't recognize your voice.”

“What are you guys doing tonight?” He says, cutting straight to the chase. He's never been one to bother with small talk, so why should he start now? There's nothing incriminating about that.

Dustin clicks his tongue, “Uhhh, no big plans? Why? What'd you have in mind?”

“Movies? Pizza? Some shitty beer if Chris' fake is still any good.”

“Yeah, hmm, uh,” Dustin says. “That sounds really fun, just um— ”

“The girl I was hooking up with has a new guy,” Mark blurts. It's below the belt, and his stomach lurches like he's at the Phoenix clubhouse when Dustin lets out a small sympathetic noise over the line.

“Dude. That _sucks_.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. I just. I'm gonna get drunk tonight anyways, but I figured this was less pathetic.”

“Gimme like. Ten seconds,” Dustin says. “There's no elevator music so please enjoy the sounds of our coffee table.”

Dustin's gone for at least several minutes, which could just as easily be a good sign as a bad one. Mark's gnawing on a hangnail when Dustin hops back on the line.

“It's all good over here! Sounds like he had some shit tonight anyways. Wanna head over here around nine?”

“Sure,” Mark says. “Thanks Dustin.”

He does feel a little bad as he hangs up, but he'll send an apologetic text later. And hey, if this actually works, he'll be able to hang out with Chris and Dustin whenever he wants and not just when Eduardo deigns to vacate the apartment.

That settled, Mark throws his pathetic grilled cheese in the trash, swipes Erica's lunch leftovers from the fridge, and takes the creaking stairs two at a time to dig up anything he can about the Fly's infamous parties from their extensive library.

He's not getting caught off guard a second time.

The night of his first ever Phoenix Prognostication, Mark had still felt grossly underprepared waiting in the foyer for Divya. But he figured it was one of those things where the only cure for trepidation was doing. Especially since what possible life experience could Mark have drawn on to watch a bunch of shitty future investment bankers play Operation on themselves. He genuinely hadn’t believed Marylin when she’d told him what the Phoenix SK club got up to behind closed doors, annoyed at the conference whenever anyone would mention splanomanthy like that was just something he should have _heard of_. 

“That has _got_ to be illegal,” Mark had said, a little queasy when Marylin was done. 

Marylin shrugged. “You wanna tell the most wealthy and powerful people in the country they can’t read the future in a man’s innards, be my guest.” 

“You’re a lawyer,” Mark admonished. “Don’t you _care_.” 

“Brown and Cornell have switched over to exclusively using animals and Phoenix club only uses their own members, so they’re putting themselves on the line to do this.” 

Mark snorted. “Okay, what about Yale?” 

“Yale is,” Marylin paused. “Complicated. But they’re only permitted to do their prognostications four times a year if it makes you feel any better.” 

It really really hadn’t, and neither had the thought that Eduardo would be tied up in any of this. _Eduardo,_ the guy who’d rescue spiders from their sink and put them out the window. Who couldn’t even handle the campy gore of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, tucking his face into Mark’s neck and wincing at all the good parts. 

“Is there anything you want to go over? I know this is one of the more,” Divya paused, looking for the diplomatic term, “Intense, compared to most of the other clubs.” 

“What, more intense than watching the star bass of the Crocadillos turn into an alpaca or whatever at Fly club?” 

“You mean Fox club.” 

“Same difference,” Mark said, dodging off the sidewalk and out of the way of a smudgy outlined Gray. 

“If it helps,” Divya said, “the way I used to remember it was that T.S. Eliot was a member of The Fox. And he wrote that book they made into _Cats_.” 

“Cats?” 

“Yeah, the musical? Anthropomorphized cats?” 

“Wasn’t T.S. Eliot a fascist?” 

“Yeah he was,” Divya said. “Is that going to help you not mix up the clubs in front of the people you’re meant to have authority over? Rookie mistakes like that aren’t exactly a confidence builder.” 

“Fine,” Mark snapped. “Whatever. I’ll just keep my mouth shut.” 

The rest of the short walk to the Phoenix clubhouse was cloaked in a tense silence, until Divya stopped abruptly, digging into his satchel. “Hold on one second.” 

“What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing,” Divya said. “I haven’t taken it yet.” He pulled a small vial out of his bag and wagged it at Mark. 

Orozcerio, Lethe’s secret weapon in defending rites against intruding Grays. They’d had Mark take some, back when his expulsion hearing had turned into Lethe recruitment, and he could still feel the taste of it in the back of his throat that had spread through him. The taste, however, had paled so much in comparison to the horrible shuddering sensation of _wrongness_ that had overcome him, as all the smudged outlines he normally saw were wiped clean like a scratch-off lottery ticket. He’d known since he was a very young child that the things he saw were people, but the vague outlines of them had always given Mark the space for a little blissful ignorance. Having seen them in all their crisp technicolour humanness added another layer of unease to the whole ordeal.

Mark didn’t envy Divya at all as he broke open the seal and downed the contents of the vial. He stayed upright for a long few moments before he finally bent over, clutching at the back of his thighs like he was going to topple over. 

“Shit,” he said, shaking a little as he pulled himself back up, teeth chattering. Mark remembered that the most, the jolt of cold, like a full-body ice cream headache. Divya shut his eyes, breathing heavily as the tremors ran through him. 

Mark realized abruptly that this wasn’t a horrible one-off experience for Divya the way it had been for him. Divya had been doing this job for three years and at least half of the clubs’ rites drew enough Grays for Orozcerio to be a necessary precaution. How many doses was that? Surely the toxicity was actually starting to affect his liver at this point. Marylin had told Mark that by the time they punched Divya she couldn’t take it anymore, that she was already on the donor list, paid for in full by Lethe of course. 

“That sucks,” Mark said inelegantly when Divya took a shuddering breath and tried to recompose himself. “That you have to take that all the time.” 

“Well we can’t all be born special,” Divya said, adjusting the strap of his satchel, still dry but with less snap to it than usual. 

“You don’t have to. Like, I’m here. So.” 

“Maybe in a few months. I’m not going to throw you into the deep end just yet,” Divya said, and then reached out and tugged Mark’s sleeve as he angled towards the front door. “No, this way, we go in around the side.” 

Mark made a face. “Really? We have to go in the back door? You’re destroying your liver for them and they make us go through the side?”

“I mean all of Lethe’s money is funnelled up from the clubs, they’re gonna pay for it, which they _love_ to remind us of,” Divya rolled his eyes. “Like we’re not the entire reason they still get to do any of this.” 

Mark blinked. “That’s so stupid.” 

“Tell me about it,” Divya said. “Maybe I’ll just find a very nice private donor so they can’t hold it over my head.” 

“I mean I’m sure the Winklevii could hook you up, I’m sure they’d be sad if you dropped dead.” 

Divya made a face not dissimilar to taking the Orozcerio. “Winklevii, really?” 

“Plural of Oculus is Oculii, so…” 

Mark mostly expected Divya to tell him off again, but instead he just snorted. “I mean, it’s Dutch so I’m pretty sure it would be Winklevossen.” 

“I’ll remember that,” Mark said, as they came to a stop in front of a nondescript side door. “What, do we just bang?” 

“There’s a bell,” Divya said. “See, right here.” It was tucked away inconspicuously beside the door, almost covered by the crawling ivy that swept down the roof. He didn’t ring it, turning back instead to Mark, serious. “The club members, they’re not my friends, Mark. And they can’t be yours either.” 

“I know that,” Mark said, _I don’t want to be their friend_. 

“You can’t— don’t ever let any of them do you favours, okay? I know you were just joking before, but— it’s easier than you might think to end up in a situation where they feel like you _owe_ them. Your objectivity is your most priceless asset in this job.” 

“I know,” Mark said. He might have been struggling to get the dozens of Lethe guidelines to stick inside his brain, but the phrase ‘no inappropriate relations’ cropped up so many times he could recite it coming out of a dead sleep. 

“Being objective about this is going to be hard for you, no one expects perfection okay? Just be smart about it.” 

The urge to snap at him logjammed in the back of his throat, any goodwill Divya had gained burning away in the flame of Mark’s indignation. He hadn’t even talked to Eduardo in _six months_ , and yeah sure, maybe that was more because Eduardo had erased himself out of Mark’s life, but Mark hadn’t exactly been chasing after him for forgiveness like a pathetic puppy either. Surely he should get at least _some_ credit for that? 

“It’s fine,” is what Mark managed to grit out, before he leaned over and rang the doorbell. 

He was half relieved and half disappointed when it wasn’t Eduardo who answered, if only because then at least Mark would be able to get it over with, rip the bandaid with Divya standing right there, rub in both of their faces how absolutely Objective and Professional he was. As it was, the guy who answered the door was some generic looking white guy who jerked his chin at Divya in recognition. 

“Hey man. Gretchen’s ready for you in the theatre,” Generic white guy said, dodging a glance at Mark and then away as he followed Divya over the threshold. 

“Who’s Gretchen?” Mark whispered, flicking through his admittedly spotty mental rolodex of the club. Despite having a public facing persona as diverse, at least by Final Club standards, the Phoenix had one of the most male dominated admin boards, and someone named Gretchen certainly would have jumped out. 

“She’s one of the haruspex,” Divya said. “She’s the one who performs the actual rite.” 

“I know what the haruspex is, I did _actually_ prepare.” 

“Just answering your question,” Divya replied, clearly his own goodwill having vanished as surely as Mark’s had. 

Gretchen turned out to be a slim, sharp-faced woman who nodded with familiarity at Divya. “This must be the new you. We’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Zuckerberg.” 

Mark should probably have been more prepared for the fact that Eduardo would have been badmouthing him to all his new besties, but the bitter shock of it erupted in the back of his throat. Divya must have seen it written all over his face because suddenly there was a firm hand on Mark’s shoulder. 

“Is there anything you need to inform us of,” Divya said with a cool evenness. “Any new variables?” 

“I’ve taken on a new discipulus, but this is his first prognostication so he will primarily be observing.” 

Divya nodded. “I’ll make a note of it. Mark, come on, let's go.” 

“Bitch,” Mark hissed under his breath the moment they were out of earshot, Divya guiding him with easy familiarity past a grand, dark-panelled dining room and a games room so cliche looking Mark expected someone to be sitting in a smoking jacket with a pipe in one of the overstuffed wing chairs. 

“They’ll get over it,” Divya said, turning into a hallway that led to a staircase. “They’ll get over it a lot faster if you don’t antagonize them.” 

“It’s not like I said it to her face.” 

“Mark, I don’t know if I’m the first person to tell you this, but you aren’t exactly hard to read,” Divya retorted with a real lack of irony for someone who Mark had never seen make any other expression than mildly displeased. 

The facial range of his Virgil quickly dropped from Mark’s mind as the most pressing issue though, as the stairs opened up into a cavernous basement room that was two parts old-school operating theatre, one part Luxor hotel lobby, with bizarre vaguely-Egyptian architecture and what looked like actual hieroglyphics on the ground. Clearly the Sphinx Club’s influence was not entirely forgotten. 

In the centre of the room there was an operating table covered in white linen, a dozen or so Phoenix members milling around and talking casually, except for a pale gingery blond kid sitting on the slab in a pair of linen pants, the arc of his shoulders curling into his bony chest as he rubbed nervously at his thighs. The _victima_ , Nathan some-such. His name had been in Mark’s notes but it hadn’t seemed very pressing compared to the sigils and markings. 

Mark scanned the crowd, all in stupid linen robes which seemed like a horrifically absurd choice for a club who cut up people on the regular, but Eduardo failed to materialize. Which was fine, for all Mark knew he had a cold or an investors association conflict. Maybe he’d chickened out at the last minute and stayed home eating pizza and playing video games with Chris and Dustin. Living it up in the life Mark was supposed to be living, the life Mark would have _happily_ been living if Eduardo had just told him the goddamn truth last year. 

But Eduardo had lied, had lied to Mark’s fucking face, so now he was stuck chasing after the world’s worst supervisor and trying to desperately memorize what clubs chanted in what dead languages for their stupid occult rituals. 

(The Phoenix’s language of choice was _demotic_ because of course it fucking was.) 

“Come on,” Divya said, pulling his chalk out of his satchel and taking the last few steps onto the floor of the room. “Here, you can just watch me this time.” 

Mark nodded, crossing his arms over his chest and trying not to be hyper-aware of all the eyes in the room that had landed on him as he followed after Divya. He unfurled what was a sort of glorified yardstick, attaching the chalk at one end so he could draw the sigils onto the floor without having to stoop over. Most of the clubs required magic protections on the compass points, but the Phoenix, with all their pseudo-Cheesecake factory Egyptian nonsense, used seven points instead of four. 

The last sigil went at the foot of the operating table, and Mark had no place to stand but awkwardly close to the shirtless _victima_ and a curly haired girl— who had to be Nathan Such-and-Such’s girlfriend— who held onto his hands as she said soothed him in a low and comforting tone.

A second flood of people came into the room, Gretchen among them, standing out starkly from the sea of milky beige linen in a full set of surgeon’s scrubs. Mark knew Eduardo was there before he saw him, the feeling in the air of the room having changed, a drastic drop in barometric pressure. 

“Mark,” Divya practically growled, voice pitched low. “Pay attention.” 

And he was. Mostly. Eyes glued to where Divya was making a complex series of markings on the floor, even as every nerve ending of his body turned to Eduardo. Barefoot, stupid fucking linen robe under a clear plastic apron, hair twice as high as it had any business being, like he had rolled out of a J Crew catalog and into a cult. He was at Gretchen’s shoulder, a clipboard clutched to his chest as Divya finished the last sigil and nodded at her. 

“Here, get settled,” Divya said, grabbing Mark by the elbow and pulling him hard away from the ring of Phoenix members in the centre of the room and halfway up the same set of stairs that lead down into the chamber. “Once the rite starts we’ll get a big influx of Grays, but once we’ve got a handle on who’s here and how well the protections are holding it’s mostly just a waiting game.” 

Now that Mark and Divya were clear of the boundary, a seriousness had fallen over the group of Phoenix members, which was honestly more disconcerting than when they’d all been milling around like a freshman mixer despite the setting. The guy on the slab drinking something unidentifiable from a hammered golden bowl as everyone else fell into formalized positions was really not helping either, spread across the room in a pattern too organized to be random. Everyone except for Gretchen and Eduardo who stayed at the head of the table and another Alum who stood at the foot, clutching the _victimas_ ankles. 

There was no hand holding, no chanting, just a large lingering silence that hummed on for ages and ages before Gretchen pulled a large ceremonial dagger over her head and thrust it down clean into poor Nathan so-and-so, his whole back bowing as she sliced him cleanly from sternum to belly button. 

Mark retched in the back of his throat, more from the sharp metallic tang of blood that filled the air of the room than the sound or the visual. Though neither of those were particularly pleasant. 

“Here we go,” Divya said in a harsh low voice, and he hadn’t even taken another breath when the smudgey outline of the first Gray entered the room, followed quickly by others on all sides until there was easily a dozen, skirting along the edges of the protections like dogs with an invisible fence. 

“Holding firm,” Divya whispered. “We don’t tend to get a lot of escalation from here but it’s always best to keep your guard up.” 

In the centre of the room, Gretchen had switched out her dagger for a set of surgeon’s scalpels, crossing around to the side of the table, blocking most of the view from where Mark was standing. He was mostly grateful for that, though it meant he was about twelve feet directly behind Eduardo. Well, directly behind if you didn’t count the Grays, and Mark had spent his life trying not to. 

“Holding up?” Divya said. “Did you get those ginger candies from Erica?” 

“I’m fine,” Mark hissed, rather than admit that he hadn’t, and while he was not in the mood to eat anything for the foreseeable future he thought he was doing pretty well. He couldn’t see much from this angle anyways, and the wet horrible sound of it was manageable as long as he wasn’t having to look directly at some junior’s innards. 

Honestly, Mark was mostly just bored after those first few tense minutes, Gretchen the Haruspex calling out a seemingly endless series of codes in demotic, two different scribes, one on either end of the room, hanging on her every word like court stenographers. The Grays drifted a little more urgently as the thick smell of blood started to hang more densely in the air and the linen on the table became soaked and spattered, but even that had an un-urgent quality to it. 

“You can sit if you want,” Divya said, gesturing for Mark at about the time Gretchen and Eduardo trailed to the other side of the table. Which was honestly for the best, keeping the temptation of looking at him at bay with the very present threat of innards. 

“No I’m fine,” Mark said, because while he was mostly sure this wasn’t a test, he could never be entirely sure with Divya. Some kind of sneaky metaphor about never sitting down on the job, because heaven forbid you not throw yourself in one hundred percent when it came to doing leg work for the Final Clubs. 

Some of the Grays still lingered, but most of them had disappeared off somewhere else. It was a Thursday night so there would no shortage of partying, crying, and sex to be found for an enterprising ghost missing the joys of being alive. Mark couldn’t blame them, wishing for a stupid AEPi theme party with a fervour he found slightly embarrassing, but he couldn’t deny to himself that the longing for it rose in his chest and filled his mouth. 

This is where things got bad. 

Because Mark _was_ at a stupid event with Eduardo, the thing he was desperately longing for was almost exactly the same as the horrible awful ‘I don’t want to be here’ thing he was currently doing. Like sure, one _major_ difference, but all the elements were more or less the same when you got down to it. A fierce determination bloomed in Mark, because fuck it, why not try and make the best of a bad situation, he wasn’t going to let these minute inconsequential differences ruin whatever could be salvaged between him and Eduardo. 

And then. 

Look, in Mark’s defense he couldn’t possibly have known that he would look up and meet Eduardo’s eye right at the moment he tugged poor Nathan-the- _victima_ ’s chest cavity open a little bit wider for Gretchen with a horrible wet tearing. 

Which meant that Eduardo was looking directly at him as Mark hunched over and vomited all over the bottom two steps, narrowly missing Divya’s shoes and his satchel. 

When he looked back up half of the Phoenix members were staring at him, Eduardo’s eyes wide with judgment that felt totally unjustified for someone who was wrist deep in viscera, an involuntary-seeming scoff working it’s way out of his mouth. 

Divya, for all his flaws, was actually pretty nice about the whole thing, letting Mark go as

soon as Nathan so-and-so was magically stitched back together and sitting up in a puddle of his own blood. Divya dosed the whole area with a vial of something from his bag and then swept up the now dehydrated mess with a stack of paper towels some fledgling Phoenix member had grabbed for him. 

“Happens to the best of us,” Divya said, patting Mark twice on the shoulder. 

“By which you mean you did it?” 

Divya smirked. “Exactly.” 

“Somehow that’s not very comforting, given this was supposed to be making a good first impression.” 

“Don’t worry, I’m gonna slap your boy discipulus with a fine for being in contempt of Lethe for that little scoff.” Divya patted him again a little harder. “They’ll be too scared to say shit next time.”

“Um, okay,” Mark said, oddly touched that Divya had jumped so quickly to his corner. 

“Big tip for this job, Mark? It _is_ better to be feared than loved.” 

“Someone tell that to them,” Mark said, clambering to his feet and jerking his chin at Nathan who was clinging to his girlfriend, neither of them seeming particularly preoccupied with the biohazard that was causing. 

“It’s just asking for trouble,” Divya said, turning to go back up the stairs. “Falling in love with someone in a club. It’s insanity.”

Mark had thought that was a touch melodramatic and a lot cynical, so he’d been pleasantly surprised when he’d stopped by Divya’s room later that week to drop off his report on the Phoenix prognostication, only to spot the static distortion outline of Cameron Winklevoss hovering in the corner. Having the world’s most obvious kryptonite was maybe not the endearment that Mark would have asked for, but hey, at least it was something., Even Divya Narendra was human when you got past all the layers of Lethe self righteousness. 

Now Mark just had to convince himself that Eduardo still was too. 

Given that Eduardo was the one who taught Mark the art of showing up fashionably late, he figures that his nine o'clock appointment time with Chris and Dustin wasn't when Eduardo actually planned to head over to the Fly. Even still he's camped out on a bench half a block down from number two Holyoke Place at quarter to nine, an apologetic text to Dustin about how some Lethe stuff had come up and they'd have to reschedule. Mark feels bad for not feeling that bad even as Dustin sends back a whole string of sad emoticons. He has the rest of his life to make tonight up to Dustin, but if he doesn't make a move with Eduardo tonight he might never get another chance.

He flicks at the small black calling card he'd gotten from Christy inside the front pocket of his hoodie. He'd thrown a blazer on over it in case they were real snobs about enforcing a dress code. Spee Club had complained to Divya when he'd show up to their rite in a pullover sweater that was spattered in bright purple paint from when he'd helped his sister paint her bedroom two summers ago. Apparently that was too casual for an evening of summoning spirits into the body of some poor old lady who'd donated her body to science.

There's a lot of Grays out, which is expected for a Saturday night, everyone out drinking and eating and fucking and fighting, but even accounting for that there's an unusually large number clumped around the Fly's clubhouse. They have wards, just like Lethe does, so they have to keep their distance, but Mark winces every time someone walks through them.

The clubhouse is shockingly silent and empty-seeming from the outside, despite the number of people Mark has seen admitted. More wards, sound dampening and probably some sort of glamour to make the place look empty despite all the revelry that was currently happening inside. One of the appeals of the Fly's parties, and one of the dangers, was that they pumped the whole place with an emotion-enhancing elixir the oh-so-original members of the Fly called Ambrosia. Which, if all the cramped handwriting notes Mark had suffered through were to be believed, was dispersed into the air like fog and created an intense feeling of euphoria. Incredibly powerful emotion magic aside, though, the Fly had a habit of acting exactly like any other clique with coolness capitol, with a constantly changing roster of enemies and allies among the other clubs. At the start of the year Phoenix SK had been in their bad books, Mark wonders what must have changed to get them on the invite list tonight, and who had been kicked to the bottom of the list in their place. 

Irrationally but instinctively he wonders if Eduardo was at all involved in this change of heart. 

There's a dampness in the air that makes waiting around just on the wrong side of unpleasant, which at least has the advantage of making Mark increasingly annoyed that he hasn't shown up yet (he’s pretty sure this is _unfashionably_ late by Eduardo’s own metric). It’s almost ten thirty when Mark catches sight of the familiar profile of Eduardo with his coat collar turned up tucked amongst a small group of Phoenix members, their voices echoing loudly. Mark recognizes Nathan victima and his curly haired girlfriend, clinging together as Eduardo follows after them up to the white pillar lined front door. 

Mark’s palms itch and he forces himself to stay where he is. He knows he should give Eduardo a good head start, ten minutes, maybe more. If he wants to have any kind of advantage to talk to Eduardo when he’s in a good mood from huffing lungfuls of Ambrosia, he needs to give it time. It’s the only reason he’s bothering to risk getting caught at a club party in the first place rather than hoping for the best and cornering Eduardo after Econ 395. 

Which okay, kind of sounds shitty. Like he’s some creep at a frat party lying in wait until his target has had a few drinks and is a little less picky. But it’s not about that at all. He’s not trying to make Eduardo vulnerable, he’s just trying to catch him off guard enough that Eduardo will get out of his own way and actually _listen_ to what Mark has to say. That’s the way it’s always been between them, Mark having to give him an excuse so Eduardo can feel like he didn’t really engage in behaviour that was lesser than him. So he could point back and say let the record show that someone bullied him into it, or he was off his game because of factors outside of his control. 

Mark has always been more than happy to give him that out. 

He manages what he hopes is about ten and is probably closer to seven minutes before following Eduardo into the party, the sound of it slamming against him like a physical wall as he passes through the white pillars that line the door, over the threshold of the protections. The door guy nods him through with a lack of fanfare which makes Mark suspect he didn’t need the jacket. He really wishes he’d left it at home when he steps into the entryway where the damp humidity hangs in clouds, aided by what look like those wall-mounted air fresheners, pumping jets of what has to be Ambrosia into the air every thirty seconds. 

Mark had taken the necessary precautions, a truly horrid vial of antidote he’d found stuffed in the appropriate library drawer. He half regrets it though as he slips into the house, partygoers relaxed and laughing in little clusters while Mark makes his way through the clubhouse, shoulders pinned up to his ears. A few people seem to recognize him, the female trio from the Porc eye him warily from the stairs and he gets a round of bro nods from the A.D. Club guys, as it hits Mark for the first time that people are going to know he was here. 

Maybe it will help his rep with the clubs.

Or maybe it will just get back to Divya and blow up in his face. 

Mark shoves the thought down; he can deal with that later if and when it happens. Right now he has a job to do, he needs to focus. He needs to find Eduardo. 

Which is probably why Eduardo finds him first as Mark is methodically scouring the rooms of the Fly’s clubhouse. 

“Mark?” he says from behind him, Mark clearly having entered the parlour from the wrong side and ended up with Eduardo behind him. Not exactly the entrance he’d been hoping to make, but Eduardo’s eyes are wide with surprise when Mark turns around so he thinks he deserves _some_ credit still. 

“Hi,” Mark says, unoriginally. Eduardo’s standing with a semi-circle of other Phoenix members, Nathan-the- _victima_ , his girlfriend, some ginger guy and another girl with a glossy brown ponytail pulled high on the top of her head. The Phoenix SK members look wary but less openly hostile than they had at the prognostication. Emotion magic has its perks. 

Including the way Eduardo, instead of looking mad, just blinks at him incredulously and says, “What are you doing here? And what are you _wearing_.” 

“I was invited,” Mark says, ignoring the less important question.

“I thought Lethe wasn’t allowed at Final Club parties,” Nathan’s girlfriend says, arms crossing over her chest when Mark just shrugs in response. It’s not really any of her business. 

“Aren’t you supposed to— did you lie to Dustin?” Eduardo snorts. “Oh my god, you are unbelievable. Did you seriously _lie_ to Dustin just to make sure I’d be here? You set this all up.” There’s an edge of annoyance creeping into his disbelief — even magic has its limits, Mark supposes. 

“I needed to tell you something,” Mark lands on. “It’s important.” 

“Okay…” 

“Privately.” 

Eduardo’s forehead puckers. “No. Just tell me here, Mark.” His Phoenix friends are starting to look less like an entourage and more like the expulsion board that had been Mark’s judge, jury, and executioner. It’s not ideal, but he’s come this far and—

“I lost my virginity,” he says, flatly. “So I wanted to say thank you I guess cause, you know, if you hadn’t blabbed about me to Summers then I’d never have gotten the Lethe gig and—” 

Eduardo’s grabbing him fast and pulling him by the arm of his blazer out of the parlour and away from everyone else, muttering sharply under his breath something that Mark fails to make out other than the harsh K of his name. 

“What is _wrong_ with you,” Eduardo says, finally pulling them to a stop in a random hallway alcove. “Why are you _like this_!?” 

“Like what?” Mark replies, because he genuinely doesn’t know. 

“Like….” Eduardo waves his hands like he’s conducting a musically challenged middle school band. Mark would know, he played the oboe until eighth grade. “Gah. You _suck_.” 

“I suck?” Mark fires back. “I told you I wanted to go somewhere private.” 

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re trying to be all emotionally vulnerable so I’ll talk to you. This is just like when you puked at the prognostication!” 

“Are you accusing me of throwing up to get your attention? Do you seriously think I’m that desperate?” 

Edaurdo ignores him. “And you know what the sick part is? It’s working!” 

Mark scoffs. “And whose fault is that? You’re the one who dragged me over here. I didn’t hold a gun to your head. I didn’t use my position to force you into something.” 

Eduardo exhales heavily, runs a hand over his face, and then, making a face like he’d rather not be saying it, asks, “Who was it?” 

Mark squints. “What?” 

“The— virginity. Who was it?” 

“Oh it was Erica. Albright. Our Oculus. She needed my deflowering blood for magic stuff.” 

“Seriously?” 

“Very judgmental from the guy who slices people open and reads their innards.” 

“Wish I could slice you open,” Eduardo mutters under his breath. “Then maybe you’d make some fucking _sense_.” 

A pack of giggling girls sweeps by them, the outermost one bumping into Mark and then shooting him a look over her shoulder. Like she wasn’t the one who walked into him. These club types always expect you to get out of their way. 

“I don’t get why you’re so mad at me,” Mark says, his resolve to being cool and unaffected slowly but surely melting away. “I should be the one mad at _you_ and I barely am, so like. I don’t know what you’re up on your high horse about.” 

“You literally tried to expose every single person at this party because you were mad I couldn’t tell you club secrets! And I mean it when I say _couldn’t_ because they made us sign a bunch of shit from the Delphic and you know how binding those contracts are.” 

Mark did because he’d had to witness a logomancy prenup being drawn up just the other week in a move so unromantic Mark had had to resist the temptation to ask the groom why he was even getting married in the first place. He knows this and yet the urge to contradict Eduardo spirals up out of him hot and fast. 

“You didn’t even _try_!” Mark snaps. “I’d never told anyone before about— that I could see— and then you just. You laughed in my face and acted like I was crazy when you _knew_ I knew something was up. You didn’t even try to find a loophole. I spent _weeks_ building the Facebook and you won’t even talk to me for five fucking minutes at a party a year later? You’re not the victim in this story Eduardo, you’re an _asshole_.” 

Mark’s hands are shaking and he clenches one of them in the bottom of his jacket. He doesn’t really expect Eduardo to take any of this lying down, so he’s prepared for Eduardo to launch into an equally defensive tirade. He’s ready for Eduardo to call him an asshole back, as well as any other flaws upon his character (of which Mark has been regularly informed there are many). 

He’s not ready for Eduardo to look at him with dangerously soft eyes and say, “You’d never told anyone?” 

That’s. Mark was not expecting that. 

“I mean. My parents and like, there were some doctors and therapists they made me talk to, but—” 

“But it’s different,” Eduardo finishes for him, and it’s terrifying, it's more terrifying than anything Mark has witnessed the last few months, more terrifying than growing up in a world with no answers for who or what he was. He and Eduardo have slipped back into sync. 

He would be more excited-slash-terrified about this if Divya hadn’t chosen that moment to make a dramatic entrance, puffed up like one of those African snakes you see on Discovery Channel. His eyes are rage wild and he looks less composed than Mark thought was possible. 

“What. The _fuck_ are you playing at,” Divya seethes. And he manages to catch Mark off guard enough that he stumbles along after Divya all the way to the front entry before he has the wherewithal to pull his arm from when he’d grabbed Mark around the wrist so hard it felt like the bones of his arm were going to clack together.

“Look— ” Mark starts. 

“No you fucking look, _Dante_ ,” Divya says. “I get that you don’t give a _fuck_ about this job or the clubs or this school or anyone, frankly, but your goddamn self. But unless you desperately _want_ Summers wiping your entire fucking memory then you better get the fuck on board with this. Because guess what asshole? Lethe Board trusts you so fucking little that I’m getting an on-the-house master’s degree so I can be here and babysit your ass for the next two years.” 

“What!?” 

“Yeah, you heard me. And after having to come down here tonight to drag your ass out because I got a text from the social chair of the goddamn _Porcellian_ telling me she saw you, I can’t even blame the Lethe Board for insisting on it.” 

“I don’t need you to babysit me, _Virgil_ ,” Mark snaps back because what the _fuck_. He doesn’t need Divya Narendra breathing over his shoulder for another ten months, much less another two _years_. 

“Well apparently I fucking do since you’re getting cozy with club members at a goddamn Fly party,” Divya says. 

“Hey, hey,” Eduardo says, having followed after them because apparently fear for Mark’s bodily state outweighed his own annoyance. “Mark didn’t break any rules— ” 

“You better back the fuck up Saverin or I’m going to slap you with so many fines your head is going to spin,” Divya says. 

Mark is making his best _do something_ face in Eduardo’s direction when Divya turns at just the wrong moment to get a huge facefull of Ambrosia spray inches away from his face. 

“Fuck,” Divya wheezes, coughing with a painful sounding rattle and wiping his face with the back of his hand. “Perfect. Fucking perfect.” 

“Are you alright? I think maybe if we could just step outside for a moment and calm down we could figure this out,” Eduardo is saying in his best flavour of sheepish accommodation. People are looking at them, curious eyes over the rims of cups, and Divya shoves Mark with a little more tact through the front entryway and out onto the front steps. 

The Ambrosia seems to have done absolutely nothing for Divya’s rage boner, “We’re going. Now.” Which, okay, Mark is not going _anywhere_ with Divya, not when he was finally (finally!) getting somewhere with Eduardo. And he’s about to say as much when Divya’s face scrunches up unreadably and suddenly he’s keeling over, hands clenched at his side, shoulders tensed up close to his neck. 

Eduardo darts a glance over like Mark will know what’s happening. “Is everything okay?” he asks, and Mark gives him an incredulous _how the fuck should I know_ gesture. When Divya does move after a long thirty seconds, Mark pokes him in the shoulder semi-gently. 

“Dude, are you gonna barf?” 

“ _No-Oo_ ,” Divya says, voice cracking uninspiringly and face growing redder. 

“Are you sick? Is it the Ambrosia? Do you need some sort of antidote?” Mark says, noticing for the first time that Divya is without his satchel. Divya always has his stupid satchel full of Virgil stuff with him, and Mark scrambles to remember if he’d had it inside. 

“Where’s your bag? Did you put it down inside?” Mark says and is treated to another stiff head shake from Divya. “Okay, then where the fuck is it?” 

“It’s— ” Divya starts, voice crackling like radio interference, as he struggles through each word, “It’s, I left it— at, at, _Cam’s_.” On Cameron’s name though, his voice suddenly splits open into a sob and suddenly Divya’s whole body is shuddering forward, his head hanging heavily between his shoulders which judder up and down as he bursts into sobs. 

“Holy fuck,” Eduardo says behind Mark, which it’s nice to know he’s not alone in his abject horror, but it confirms just exactly how fucked it is. 

“Divya,” Mark snaps. “What’s wrong, what do you need?” 

Divya shakes his head, gasping for breath between sobs and making a series of inhuman noises Mark can’t even begin to decipher, making him long for getting yelled at. At least an angry Divya was one he knew how to deal with. He’s not sure if Divya is hurt, or poisoned, or actually fucking dying because he’s crying enough that he might actually be. 

“What do we do?” Eduardo asks, eyes wide and horrified. 

“I have to take him back to Lethe,” he says.

“I’ll help,” 

“It’s fine, you don’t have to.” 

Eduardo tilts his head. “How the hell are you gonna get him there by yourself? Just let me help.” 

“No, it’s fine,” Mark says. “Don’t— don’t do that thing you do where you’re all accommodating so you can like, lord it over me later.” 

“I’m not— ” Eduardo starts and doesn’t finish because he becomes immensely preoccupied in grabbing Divya by the waist before he falls forward. He’s wailing like someone killed his dog, like someone is killing him, a harsh primal kind of sobbing that sounds painful as it’s ripped out of him. More to the point he’s really loud, and Mark knows they need to get him out of here before someone walking by hears him now that they’re on the other side of the Fly’s protections. 

“Don’t you have like, Lethe stuff?” Eduardo says.

“Divya always has it in his bag, I never have to bring stuff,” Mark says, digging a hand into his hoodie pocket as if to prove that all he has on him are his phone and that stupid little square invite card that Christy gave him, only for his fingers to find the velvety edge of the bag Thom had given him earlier. He’d meant to put it in Erica’s room for her to deal with, but maybe his procrastination is finally paying off for once. 

“Hey,” Mark says, pulling the bag out of his pocket and trying to get it into Divya’s eyeline, which is a challenge. “This is portal shit, yeah? Scroll & Key? How does it work?” 

That seems to set Divya off even more, sobs that turn into shuddering gasps so bad that Eduardo has to readjust his grip on Divya as he tries to melt into the asphalt. “Mark, you’re the Dante,” Eduardo says, eyes wide and concerned. “Figure it out.” 

Mark clenches his jaw and pulls open the bag. Inside are two small mushrooms, and not even a particularly exciting kind, just like the normal beige button mushrooms his mom chops up and puts on frozen pizza. “I don’t— ” he starts, a flurry of movement catching his eye. 

“Shit.” 

“What?” Edaurdo says. “What’s wrong?” 

“Grays incoming,” Mark says, and really he should have expected that before now, they love the salt in sweat and tears in about equal measure. A ring of maybe a dozen or so are starting to drift closer, and Mark scours his brain for one of the inane death word phrases Divya had made him memorize back at the beginning of the year but nothing rises to the surface. Grays aren’t dangerous, mostly, but Mark doesn’t want to test the theory with Divya incapcitated. 

“We need to go. Now,” Mark says, he pulls one of the mushrooms out of the bag, takes a wild guess, and shoves it into his mouth, grabbing for Eduardo who’s still holding Divya upright. Mark chews feverishly and tries to see Divya’s Virgil quarters in his mind’s eye. For a terrifying half second nothing happens and he thinks he’s fucked up horribly but then, like missing the last step at the top of the stairs, he’s toppling forward, pulling Eduardo and Divya along with him and landing with a hard creaking thud on the upper floor of Lethe House. 

“Ow,” Mark says from where he's sprawled at the foot of Divya’s huge four poster bed. Eduardo groans in reply, and Divya is still sobbing, so that’s everyone accounted for. 

Eduardo sits up on his knees, brushing himself off as he stands. “We should maybe try and get him on the bed?” 

Mark scrambles to his feet, nodding as they maneuver to either side of Divya and inelegantly try and get him upright. “Divya, could you fucking help a little here!” Mark snaps.

Divya mutters something garbled past the point of being intelligible, but does seem to actually try to get his legs under himself, Eduardo and Mark managing to heave him onto his bed where he immediately curls into himself like a little kid. 

It feels wrong to be in Divya’s room. Mark’s only ever seen it from the doorway, or glimpses from Divya’s adjoining office, where stacks of books and notes are still piled high on the gleaming surface of his dark wood desk. Mark takes an instinctive half step back from the bed, feeling like when he was a little kid being dragged to antique shops with his mom, hands clasped firmly behind his back so he wouldn’t break anything. Divya still hasn’t stopped crying, but the wailing has died down to pitiful whimpers, most of which are muffled by the mattress at least.

“Here, c’mon,” Mark says, grabbing for Eduardo’s elbow, Divya not even looking up when he half trips over his guitar stand as Mark pulls him out of the room and into the small hallway. 

“Do you hear that banging?” Eduardo says. “Or did I just hit my head on the dismount.”

“You did not, you big baby,” Mark says. 

“I could have,” Eduardo says, brushing off his knees. Mark sees him catch sight of Divya’s guitar in the corner, his mouth quirking. “I wouldn’t have called the Virgil wailing on electric guitar.” 

“It’s for his cover. I mean I’m pretty sure he actually plays, but.” 

“Cover?” 

“Yeah,” Mark says with a shrug. “Like, so we can explain where we go at all hours. He’s in a band. Allegedly” 

“Huh,” Eduardo says, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “What’s yours.”

“Acapella group.” 

“It is _not_.” 

“It was Erica’s idea,” Mark says, feeling his mouth dart up into a smile against his will, like the way your arms float up into the air if you press them against a doorway long enough. 

“What are you gonna do when someone expects you to prove this?” 

Mark snorts. “Who would that be exactly? I’m doing Lethe stuff like ninety percent of the time. Dustin already knows, Chris is too polite to ask. Who else cares what I’m doing?” He stares over Eduardo’s shoulder at a spot on the wall so he doesn’t have to look too closely at the look on his face right now. He’s not looking for sympathy, he’s just stating a fact. 

There’s a loud hammering, three rattling bangs, coming from vaguely downstairs which makes both of them jump, Eduardo smoothing back down like a startled cat. “See, I told you I heard something.” 

“Well at least you’re not concussed,” Mark says, grabbing the metal rail of the spiral stairs that lead down from the Virgil’s attic quarters to the second floor. 

“Should we just— ” Eduardo darts a glance over his shoulder towards Divya’s room. “I don’t think we should leave him.” 

“I mean if he hasn’t erupted into flames yet I’m sure he’ll be fine for like, two more minutes,” Mark says, shrugging as whoever’s at the front door bangs loudly again. 

“Christ,” Eduardo flinches a little. He’d seemed mostly unaffected by the Ambrosia at the party, maybe because he was still capable of getting annoyed with Mark, but now in the silence of Lethe house it’s a lot more apparent the ways it’s affecting him. How his eyes are just slightly too wide, shoulders a little too jumpy, like how you never realize how drunk you actually are until you’re alone in the bathroom.

Mark has sort of a personal rule against over-explaining things, he’s pretty sure that all human communication could be streamlined up to twenty-five percent if everyone just stopped staying the obvious out of some sense of arbitrary politeness. So it’s a concession for him to shrug and say, “Erica probably just forgot her keys,” as the old metal spiral stairs squeak under his feet. 

Mark’s pretty sure having a club member in the upper floors of Lethe is breaking some rule, and he feels the heavy weight of judgment coming out of every photo of Lethe alums from years gone by. He tries not to think about Sean Parker’s notable lack of presence as Eduardo follows behind him down the front staircase. Surely whatever sins he’s committed tonight are at least semi-balanced out by his quick handling of Divya’s situation. Probably. 

“Here maybe,” Mark waves a vague hand at Eduardo, “Don’t be like, right behind me.” He’s already resigned himself to the fact that Eduardo’s presence in the house will require a lot of follow-up questions from Erica, so he’d rather not lead with that if he doesn’t have to. Especially if Thom is still with her. He leans over to hit the gleaming copper light switch at the bottom of the stairs, bathing the foyer in light as he unlocks all three latches, the last one sticking a little like it always does. 

“Jesus Christ, Divya! I don’t have time for this,” The voice of definitely-not-Erica calls through the door, as Mark finally gets it open. 

“Hi,” Mark says. 

“Oh um, hello,” Cameron Winklevoss says, his hand tightening self-consciously around the strap of what Mark immediately recognizes as Divya’s bag. “I apologize, I thought you were— Is Divya here?” 

“I’m assuming you’re here to drop that off,” Mark says, gesturing for the satchel, but Cameron seems reluctant to hand it off. Seriously, what the hell is Divya saying to his not-boyfriend that paints Mark as incapable of passing off a simple object from one person to another?

Cameron gives Mark that tight polite smile that all Final Club members seem to instinctively default to, at least around him. “I’d rather leave it with him if you don’t mind, I actually have something confidential we need to discuss.” 

“Uhh,” Mark says, unhelpfully. 

“Divya’s actually not in a state to see guests at the moment,” Eduardo says, gliding into the conversation with the same apparent ease he does everything except for make up with his former best friends. “But I’m sure Mark would be happy to handle the transaction for you.” 

“I didn’t realize having Phoenix club members over was part of Lethe protocol,” Cameron says. 

“Wardo and I were actually friends before I got punched,” Mark says quickly, like it’s not a lie. Because it’s not. “Just like you and Divya,” he adds, in case Cameron’s going to go running off to Summers the minute this is dealt with. 

The secondary implications of this don’t hit him until a half second after it’s out of his mouth. 

“Alright then,” Cameron says, the polite expression morphing into something a little sharper, more the baring of teeth than a smile. “If he’s not taking personal calls right now I guess I’ll just hold onto this until our paths cross for business reasons.” He’s already half turned to go in his stupid toggle coat. “Tell Divya he knows where he can find me when he wants to deal with this like an adult.” 

“No you _can’t_ , we need it,” Mark snaps before he can stop himself. Without Erica that bag is their best chance of fixing whatever the hell is wrong with Divya. 

“Well I guess Divya should have considered that before he ran off in the middle of our evening and left it with me,” Cameron says evenly, arms crossing over his stupidly broad chest, and Mark does not have time for this petty trouble in paradise nonsense. 

“Look,” he says, forgoing any facade of polite Lethe protocol that he’d been upholding. “I don’t know what happened with you and Divya, and I do not care what happened with you and Divya. But he is all messed up right now and we _need_ that bag so if you could just hand it over I will pass on your general criticisms to him as soon as he is in a state to receive them.” 

“What do you mean he’s ‘messed up’? I saw him half an hour ago, he was fine,” Cameron says, pushing past Mark into the foyer, pulling the door shut behind him. Like he’s planning on staying for a while. Yippee. 

Mark glances over at Eduardo on muscle memory and Eduardo shrugs, if they’re being honest…“He got a big facefull of Ambrosia at the Fly, I guess he’s having— who knows?— An allergic reaction. We had to portal him back.” 

“Yeah must be some kind of. I don’t know, weird counter-reaction instead of just making him slap-happy,” Eduardo offers helpfully, but Cameron seems less than reassured by this, his face doing a truly odd series of facial expressions. 

“No that’s not— Ambrosia doesn’t make you happy.” 

Mark squints. “Yes it does, it makes the party more fun, it makes everyone feel good.” 

Cameron shakes his head. “No, it _doesn’t_. It makes you feel a more heightened version of what you’re already feeling. So yes, at a party where people are having fun it will make you happy, but that’s not what it _does_.” 

This does not make anything clearer, and Mark says as much, blinking, “Okay, then why the fuck did it make Divya sob his guts out?” 

It’s like everything inside Cameron goes very very still for a moment, the haunting coin flip of how he looks when he leaves his body, before he seems to snap back into himself abruptly, pushing past Mark and Eduardo and sweeping up the stairs. “Div! Divya!” He calls, footsteps thundering behind him. 

Nothing about tonight has gone remotely the way he planned it. Mark just wanted a chance to talk to Eduardo on neutral ground, and now he’s been thrown overboard into the stormy sea that is Cameron and Divya’s semi-illicit relationship and he’s a little more than done with all of it. 

But somehow his body didn’t quite get that message, rushing up the stairs after Cameron Winklevoss. 

“Mark, what the fuck is happening,” Eduardo says, keeping up impressively. 

“If I knew I would tell you!” he shoots over his shoulder, and then practically slams into the back of Cameron who has stopped at the bottom of the spiral stairs into the attic. His hand is on the bannister and from here Mark can just make out the reinvigorated sobs of Divya. Great, he got his second wind. 

“Are you going up or what?

Cameron looks over his shoulder and Mark doesn’t even know what to make of the expression on his face. “I’ve never been in his room before.” 

Which isn’t actually true, Mark’s seen him float through the house enough times — though not recently, which might have been a side effect to their new and improved virgin blood fueled wards — but it’s not like Cameron knows that any less well than he does. 

“If you’re not gonna help— ” Mark jabs him firmly in the back, and that seems to do the trick, Cameron exhaling loudly and then taking the stairs evenly, like a man being marched to his own execution. He’s a little surprised when Eduardo stays where he’s been stationed through this whole ordeal, right behind him, but Mark figures this whole situation must be even more absurd from where he’s standing. Who is he to begrudge Eduardo for refusing to give up his front row seat to this nonsense. 

Still, he draws a line at following Cameron into the room, holding his arm up to block off Eduardo from following. If Cameron Winklevoss wants to throw himself headlong into this mess, that’s his prerogative, but Mark doesn’t have to stand directly behind him for this one. 

“Divya?” Cameron says cautiously, letting Divya’s satchel slip off of his shoulder and onto the smooth wooden floor. From the doorway Mark can see that Divya’s managed to push himself into a sitting position, his legs dangling off the side of the bed, the toes of his shoes they hadn’t bothered to remove barely scraping the floor. All of the beds in Lethe are like this, high enough that you needed to hoist yourself into them. Divya’s still crying, a little less inhumane but almost more painful to listen to as he struggles around the edges of words, something that might have been Cameron’s name pulled out of him like a hook pulled out of a fish. 

“Hey, hey, Div it’s okay. It’s okay,” Cameron says suddenly a little more frantic, kneeling in front of him. Divya’s shoulders shake and he fails to form anything coherent around sobs before folding in on himself at the waist, Cameron ready for it as he pulls Divya into his arms. Mark half expects Divya to shrug him off, even in the state he’s in, something about Divya wanting to be physically comforted by anyone a little too much to process. But he just melts into it, his forehead pressed into Cameron’s shoulder and whimpering the linguistic equivalent of a note you left in your pocket that went through the wash. 

Mark catches a few snippets of words, _graduation_ , _two years_ , _breakup_ , and it doesn’t take a genius to put it together. They’re in relationship limbo because Summers asked Divya to stay another two years, and from the sounds of it Divya is even less pleased about it than Mark is. 

“It’s going to be okay, it’s all going to work out,” Cameron soothes, a hand rubbing up and down Divya’s back. 

“ _I’m the worst Virgil_ ,” Divya sobs out, pulling his face off of Cam’s shoulder, the first truly intelligible thing he’s managed since he combusted in front of the Fly. _“I let everyone down.”_

“You didn’t.” 

“ _I did, I did, I let down Mark and Lethe and my parents and now I’m going to lose yo-ou_ ,” he chokes out. 

“Baby,” Cameron says, sounding like his heart is collapsing in on itself. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not.” 

“ _Baby_?” Eduardo half whispers into Mark’s ear, and Mark tries to give the most affirmative nonchalant shrug he can. Just because he’s weirded out by it too doesn’t mean Eduardo needs to know. 

“Yeah it’s. It’s a whole thing.” 

Eduardo makes an incredulous little clicking noise in his throat — which, isn’t that the tone of the evening — drawing Cameron’s attention. 

“Can you get out of here, please? You’re not helping,” he snaps, the hand that’s rubbing Divya’s back not stilling even as he glares at them, all former pettiness in Divya’s direction clearly long forgotten. 

Mark could argue back about antidotes or Lethe protocols but he knows a good place to stop and save when he sees it, so he just shrugs and is pleasantly unsurprised when Eduardo follows after him. 

“Did you know about that?” Edaurdo asks, a thumb jabbed over his shoulder as they reach the second floor landing. The low tones of Cameron’s voice carry indistinctly as Mark settles himself on the top step, pulling out his phone so he can text Erica. 

_Oculus call in_ , he figures strict adherence to protocol will get her attention quicker than anything else, “Divya and Cameron? Yeah.” 

“Jesus. You know everyone else in the clubs they just— they think the Winklevoss twins just like sucking up to the hall monitor. I’d never have guessed that. Not in a million years.”

“You don’t stop having feelings just because you get this job,” Mark says, harsher than he means too, the hiss of it echoing in the stairwell. 

“No, I guess not,” Eduardo says, still sounding a bit dazed as he settles next to Mark on the step, legs stretched out in front of him. 

“I really didn’t do it on purpose you know,” Mark says. 

“Hmm?” 

“You said I,” Mark waves a hand. “That I puked at the Phoenix to get your attention. I didn’t.”

“Jesus, are you still thinking about that?” Edaurdo says, laughing to himself though Mark can’t imagine what’s so funny about this. “I barely remember my own name after that ordeal.” 

“Aren’t you supposed to be training to be the new haruspex? How are you gonna handle that if you can’t deal with a little emotional magic mishap?” 

Eduardo rolls his neck. “It’s different. There’s rules and order and protocol. I look and I just see things. It’s like math. Clean, elegant.” 

Mark cannot think of anything that seems less clean and elegant than digging inside someone’s guts for stock trading advice, but he doesn’t think Edaurdo will take that well, so he doesn’t push it. But somehow Eduardo seems to hear his disdain anyways, giving Mark a sideways glance. “What?” 

“I didn’t say anything.” 

“Yeah but you wanted to,” Eduardo says, picking at an imaginary thread on his stupid designer slacks. 

“Yeah but I _didn’t_ ,” Mark snaps. “Am I in trouble now for things I didn’t do? That’s an unfair system, even for you.” 

“Wow, okay,” Eduardo says, tongue running against his teeth. “Do you want me to go?”

“I didn’t ask you to stay,” Mark points out sullenly, and then, because fuck it, “No.” 

“Okay,” he agrees, even though he hadn’t moved at all. 

The acoustics of this conversation are off, Mark realizes, all of his and Eduardo’s old arguments backed by the constant ambient noise that only living in a dorm crammed full of other students can provide. Lethe is old and has enough old ticking clocks and strange little creaks, but it’s not the same, the spaces between notes too long, too abrupt. 

“This isn’t fucking fair,” Mark says to his knees because it’s easier than looking at the way that Eduardo’s collar is stuck up beside his face like a dog with one cocked ear. 

“What’s not— ” 

“We’re so _bad_ at this,” he throws his hands forward, grasping for something unattainable, “We were bad at being at being friends and now we’re bad at _not_ being friends. This doesn’t seem fair.” 

“We weren’t bad at being friends,” Eduardo shoots back. 

“Oh my mistake,” Mark says. “So you think trying to trick me into thinking I was crazy when I told you I could see Grays was a perfectly healthy and normal thing for a friend to do.” 

“You wouldn’t leave it alone!” Eduardo says, punching his fist into his thigh. “It’s not like it was fun for me either, Mark, and I kept trying to change the subject and you kept just— circling right back to it like you didn’t even. It wasn’t even about _me_ anymore it was just about you having to find _answers_.” 

“What and that’s so horrible? Not wanting to be left in the dark? What was I supposed to do, just pretend I didn’t know that you were lying all the time? Just buy your bullshit story that you were switching majors because your _mother_ wanted you to be a doctor even though your mom always wanted you to be a lawyer?” 

“ _YES_ ,” Eduardo says, throwing his hands forward. “Oh my god Mark, people have the discretion to pretend they don’t know people are lying all the time.” 

Mark frowns. “I don’t think that’s true.” 

“Of course _you_ don’t.” Eduardo says, and then after a moment, softer, “I was going to tell you. When I could. I was going to.” 

“You can’t prove that.” 

“Yeah because _someone_ made the Facebook and then almost got expelled.” 

Mark claws at the tops of his thighs. “Well we’ll never know that now, I guess. Unless Phoenix fortunetelling has a hindsight option.” 

Eduardo snorts. “Yeah that’s not really how it works.” 

“Too bad,” Mark says. “I bet my intestines have lots of interesting stock market predictions.” 

“I mean there’s always more than that,” Eduardo says, his voice getting that glossy edge to it he always got when he was talking about weather prediction models or chess strategies. Like he doesn’t want anyone else to know how badly he wants to talk about it in case he gets cut off. “You see a lot of weird stuff in people, everything about you it’s just. Trapped under the surface.” 

“How do you know it’s not just,” Mark shrugs and waves a hand. “Wishful thinking.” 

“It was part of punching, we had to read stuff in animal bones. Entrails. You can tell when people are just making stuff up. I had a knack for it.” 

This still sounds sort of suspicious to Mark, but Eduardo sounds confident enough about it so between that and the several hundred years of anecdotal evidence from the Phoenix he thinks he can probably take his word for it. 

“Do you think it would help, if you did?” Mark offers after a long moment. 

“What?” 

“At the party you said— that you wanted to— ” Mark mimes a line down his sternum. 

“Oh Jesus Mark, I was just mad, I didn’t— I wasn’t seriously— ” 

Mark can hear himself talking too fast, but being aware of his flaws has never been enough of an incentive towards correction. “Okay but if it would _help_ , if it would make you _understand_.” 

“I do understand, that’s not the problem Mark,” Eduardo says. “I know exactly why you did it.” 

“I don’t think you do,” Mark counters easily, and is satisfyingly rewarded with the back of Eduardo’s neck starting to flush in irritation. “Because I think you still think I should be sorry and that there was a way it didn’t have to happen like this.” 

“It _didn’t_ have to happen like this.” 

Mark shakes his head. “I don’t think either of us would have made different choices given the information available to us at the time.” 

“Oh, cool, great so you’re just. Not sorry for being extremely petty and jealous instead of being happy for me.” 

“I didn’t say that,” Mark sniffs, “I just said I wouldn’t have done anything differently at the time.” 

“Right, okay, thanks,” Eduardo half laughs, leaning forward on his elbows and rubbing at his face. 

“I don’t see you poking holes in your own ‘just hope I drop it’ plan. Why did you even think that would work?” 

“So it’s my fault? It’s my fault that I thought maybe for once in our friendship I could put myself first and you’d let me?” 

“Yeah,” Mark shoots back. “Kinda.” Eduardo makes an incredulous noise but Mark plows forward. “No don’t play all wounded. You _love_ getting to play host, you love being the guy who takes the burden and gets the last word. It’s just another way of getting to be in charge. And I _let_ you because it made you happy, and I— I liked it.” 

The hand on Eduardo’s face is slipping a little. “You liked that it made me happy or you liked that I would take charge?” 

Mark shrugs. “I guess. Both?” 

“Jesus, Mark.” 

“So I just really think that we should do it. Like actually. I think it would make you feel better.” 

“Mark,” Eduardo says, and it’s genuinely fascinating how many different things he can make the two syllables of Mark’s name mean. “I am not doing a splanomanthy reading on you.” 

“Why not?” 

“Well for one we need to use lot of very very powerful body manipulation magic that I know almost nothing about so you wouldn’t _die_ — ” 

“Lethe has tons of resources I’m sure you could figure it— ” 

“ —For another there’s no way in hell Lethe _or_ the Phoenix would go for it, and— ” 

“ —We’d be doing it under the table obviously Wardo— ” 

“And for a third I’m not qualified to do something like that on my own. I mean you were there, basically all I do is hand Gretchen things.” 

None of these, are, in Mark’s opinion, particularly good counterarguments, but Eduardo is holding firm so he shrugs and tries a different approach. “Well maybe I’ll just ask Thom to hook me up with Skull & Bones then.” 

“What?” 

“Thom. He’s the Oculus at Yale. Skull & Bones does splanomanchy too but they get randos shipped in under the table. Extremely morally dubious if you ask me. Hell, they’d probably be thrilled to have a volunteer— ” 

There’s a hand on Mark’s chest shoving him back so hard that the wind is knocked out of him as his back hits the floor. Still trying to catch it as he looks up at the crown moulded ceiling, still out of breath as Eduardo appears in his field of vision. 

“If you think that’s bad you’re not going to be able to handle getting a ceremonial dagger in the chest,” Eduardo says, his voice low and with the kind of fragile steadiness of someone trying to balance a tray of dishes. “That’s the first incision, from the _kopis_ , cutting down from the sternum.” 

He traces a line a few inches down the centre of Mark’s chest, Mark’s whole body vibrating like it’s trying to get on the right frequency to feel more where Eduardo is barely touching the thick fabric of his hoodie. 

“Then we switch over to the surgical tools to cut the Y-incision,” he draws it over Mark’s chest, pressing a little harder, like he actually wants him to feel it this time. “That gives us free access to everything we want to be looking at.” 

“What are you hoping to find in there?” Mark says, hating the way his voice crackles, but there’s no saliva left in his mouth. 

“I don’t care,” Eduardo says, and his eyes are so wide and his face is swallowing up Mark’s entire field of view but it seems right, it seems like how things are supposed to be. And Mark barely notices people’s outline’s anymore, not when he spends all day with people who crackle along their edges like tv static, but Eduardo doesn’t look like that, Eduardo’s outline is _glowing_ , “I don’t care as long as it’s you.” 

And it’s funny because Mark doesn’t remember moving, and it didn’t seem like Eduardo had moved at all from where he’d been hovering over Mark. But it’s logistically impossible that neither of them moved because Eduardo’s mouth is on his and Mark’s hands are on the back of Eduardo’s neck and they’re kissing each other like nothing else matters. Not that Mark’s feet are banging against the edge of a step, or that Eduardo still has his coat on, or that there’s an audience of about a hundred Lethe alums — including Divya’s grandmother — watching this in silent judgment from their photos on the wall. 

Mark tries to pull back a little, not away, just to readjust from where the floor is hard and unyielding against his back, but Eduardo nips at him when he tries to pull away so Mark just opens his mouth wider and tries to press up more into him. 

Eduardo kisses with the same excited glossiness Mark’s used to hearing in his voice and it’s a shockingly familiar thrill to feel it from his mouth instead. His tongue flicks over the top of Mark’s mouth and then he does it again, stroking the same spot like he’s trying to find something. Mark shudders as his hands roam down from Eduardo’s neck, up under the layer of his jacket and Eduardo abandons his quest to topographically map the inside of Mark’s mouth to make a needy little noise of approval as Mark finds the tiniest patch of bare skin where Eduardo’s shirt had untucked from his slacks. 

“Here, here,” Eduardo says mostly into Mark’s mouth, helping him sit up a little as he pulls his coat off and then helps Mark with the stupid sport coat he’d thrown on over this hoodie. “This outfit. You’re ridiculous.” 

“Wardo shut up,” Mark says and lurches forward again. 

“Maybe we should move to your room?” Eduardo manages out as Mark starts an ambitious move from his mouth to start nipping along Eduardo’s jawline. 

“Too far,” Mark counters, which is the truth even if his room is only twenty feet away and his ass is sliding off the stair he’s sitting on at an alarming rate. It’s worth it though when Eduardo lets out a choked little curse as Mark latches onto the spot where his jaw meets his neck. 

“Mark,” Eduardo says breathlessly. 

“Mmm?” Mark hums into the skin of his neck. 

“Mark, someone’s here,” Eduardo says, pushing him away a little just in time for the front door to swing open. 

“Hello?” Erica calls into the house and Mark and Eduardo have just enough time to scramble apart before she glances up the stairs. “I got your text, is everything okay?” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Mark says, getting to his feet. “Er, well actually no.” 

“Wow that clears everything up,” Erica scoffs, Thom behind her making a polite muffled laugh. 

“How was Mary Liz?” Mark says, coming down the stairs, and who says deflection isn’t his strong suit? Erica is unimpressed however, blinking at him incredulously. 

“I got an emergency protocol text and then you didn’t answer your phone for twenty minutes, I thought I was going to come home to you and Divya having murdered each other.”

The last step creaks loudly under Mark. “About that.” 

“Oh my god what did you _do_.” 

“It’s my fault,” Edaurdo says, finally getting himself recomposed and coming down the stairs behind Mark, “Mark came to rescue me from a Fly party and there was, erm, an incident.” 

“What kind of incident?” Erica says. 

“Uh well Divya sort of,” Mark tries to roll his shoulders and shrug at the same time, “God a big dose of Ambrosia and went down for the count.” 

“Uh-huh,” she says. “And this guy is here because....” 

“Hi, Eduardo Saverin, nice to meet you,” Eduardo offers. 

“He helped me get Divya back to the house,” Mark explains. “Wardo, this is Erica, and that’s Thom. He doesn’t go here.” 

“Oh!” Thom says helpfully, “Your Brazillian friend. How’s it going brother?” 

Mark can feel Eduardo’s gaze on the back of his neck. “Good, good. Great. I should probably be going though, get out of your hair.” 

Erica is giving Mark the same look she used to give him when he was shivering shirtless on the bathroom floor and she was about to jab him with needles. Mark is starting to sense a slightly uncomfortable pattern in his romantic entanglements. It’s not his fault he’s an enigma to be unravelled and that draws a certain kind of person to him. Or at least it’s only partially his fault. 

“You should stay,” Erica says in a tone of voice that’s not up for debate, already surpassing Eduardo on the stairs. “Thom and I were just about to order a pizza, why don’t you guys do that while Mark and I handle this.” 

Eduardo hesitates. “Well, uh— ” 

“Thanks, there’s cash and menus in the far far left kitchen drawer by the toaster,” Erica continues. “Thom, you know where the kitchen is.” 

“I do!” Thom nods enthusiastically. There’s a reddish smudge in the no-man’s-land between his chin and bottom lip that looks suspiciously like the lipstick Erica was wearing earlier. 

“Don’t get olives,” Mark offers, because Eduardo is exactly the kind of person phrases like ‘if everyone else jumped off a bridge’ were made for, and he can be pinned down pretty easily by a little well-placed peer pressure. He just got Wardo back; he's not letting him slink off into the night. 

“Who’s the guy?” Erica says under her breath once Eduardo has conceded defeat and followed after Thom, their voices echoing into the kitchen. 

“Eduardo. My friend,” Mark says, too defensively, grabbing for the banister. 

“Who?” 

“I’ve mentioned him before, it's not my fault if you weren’t paying attention.” 

Erica scoffs. “Touchy, touchy. There’s Ambrosia antidote in the library, I can show you where, and then you can clean up your own mess. And if I’m feeling nice I’ll save you some pizza.” 

“Erm,” Mark says, as they reach the second floor landing. “About that. I already sort of….took it?” 

Erica stares at him blankly for a moment before what he’s said seems to process. “What the fuck happened tonight? Are you trying to get Sean Parker-ed?” Mark opens his mouth to tell her, or at least tell her a version of things that makes him sound the least terrible but she holds up a hand, “You know what. Actually. Scratch that, I don’t really want to know. Stay here, I’ll get some shit.” 

Mark waits in the hallway, trying to shove down the feeling that he’s eight years old and stuck on a chair in the middle of the kitchen in timeout. It’s a feeling that doesn’t dissipate when Erica comes back out of the library with a few vials in hand and says, “You should stay here. I’m guessing Divya’s heightened emotional state was pretty pissed.” 

Mark shakes his head. “Try sobbing his face off.” 

“What?” The vials clank together as Erica adjusts them. “Why?” 

“Summers asked him to stay another two years cause I’m shit at my job and that sort of ruins his whole thing with,” he holds a hand over his head and then spreads both of them apart in a rough physical approximation of a certain set of twins. 

“And he _cried_?” 

“Yeah. Weird, right?” 

Erica gives him an unimpressed look and reaches towards him, Mark flinches back a little, expecting a little smack, but she just fixes the lapel of his stupid jacket and gives him a fond little pat on the chest. “You look like you’re going to try and get me to invest in your hot new internet venture.” 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to help?” Mark offers, because that’s what friends and Lethe colleagues are supposed to do, not because he particularly wants to. 

He thinks Erica can tell because she rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “I think I’m good.” She readjusts her vials once more before heading up the spiral stairs to the Virgil quarters. A woman on a mission. 

Though, Mark belatedly realizes she really hadn’t been clear if he needed to stay and wait for her to come back or if he was cool to go join the Brazillians on their pizza mission. He barely has time to wonder about it though before there’s a loud telltale squeaking on the wrought iron spiral stairs and Erica is hurriedly reemerging. 

“What?” Mark says, catching the look on her face. 

“ _Why didn’t you tell me Cameron Winklevoss was up there with him!_ ” Erica hisses, making up for the lack of volume with righteous fury. 

“Oh,” Mark says sheepishly, “I guess I didn’t say that part.” 

“Jesus fuuuuu— give me a heads up next time!” She snaps, stalking into the library to put her vials back. Mark lingers in the doorway as she throws things into a drawer with as much force as you can get away with throwing a glass vial. 

“They weren’t like— ”

“They weren’t what?” She asks, fumbling around for the vintage brass light plate and throwing the library back into darkness.

“Like,” Mark gives a vague shoulder shimmy. “Sexual healing?” 

“No! I mean...I don’t think so. I think they were just,” she makes a vague arm and shoulder gesture that Mark takes to mean something along the lines of spooning. “I didn’t really stay to get a good look.” 

“I thought you liked guys who row crew.” 

She smacks him on the arm. Hard. 

“Ow. Lethe on Lethe aggression.” 

“I’ll show you Lethe on Lethe aggression, Mark,” she says, turning to go down the stairs. 

Mark gestures upwards. “Don’t you still need to give him something.” 

“Nothing I was going to give him was going to make him not-miserable quicker than getting cuddled by his boytoy. C’mon, I’m starving and this was stupid.” 

Mark darts one last glance upwards, but follows after Erica without any additional prodding, and any feelings of having abandoned his post quickly dissipate at the bright rapidfire sound of Eduardo and Thom animatedly talking in Portugeuse as Erica and Mark come into the kitchen.

Eduardo’s nodding so rapidly that it’s like his head is on a spring, as he laughs at something Thom is saying, switching back to English in a sweet but completely unnecessary gesture of inclusion, “Yes, yes, _exactly_.” 

Mark butts himself right into Eduardo’s personal space where he’s set up shop by the toaster, nudging against his arm like a stray cat that wants attention. “Olives?” 

“Not on your half,” Eduardo says solemnly. 

“Those weren’t your instructions.” 

“I’ll pick them off for you,” Eduardo says in a low tone of voice just for him, arm coming up finally around Mark’s shoulders. There’s going to be a meltdown about this later, that they can’t just go from not speaking for months to doing — whatever this is exactly that they’re doing. Not that Mark is worried, he’s always been exceptionally good at nudging Eduardo out of his tendency towards equating self-sacrifice with moral goodness. 

“We just did a veggie thing,” Thom says to Erica who is hoisting herself up to sit on their sturdy wooden butcher block. “I hope that’s okay.” 

“What, no Hawaiian?” Erica says with lilting meaning and Thom ducks his head sheepishly. 

“I may have perhaps overstated my fondness for Hawaiian pizza out of a sense of charity and duty.”

“Wow, Divya was right, you really can’t trust these Yalies,” Erica says, kicking at him from her perch playfully, which devolves into a free for all about the merits of unconventional pizza toppings in which they all ruthlessly mock Eduardo for his bizarre insistence that tuna on pizza is anything but a culinary abomination. 

(“It’s a Brazillian thing! Thom I cannot believe you are hanging me out to dry on this one.” 

“Sorry bro, I can’t get into it.” 

“Yeah see Eduardo, even your fellow countrymen know it’s gross.” 

“I’m sorry, you eat tuna straight from the can you are not allowed to have any options about how anyone else consumes it.”)

The delivery guy can’t find Lethe House, which is mostly Erica’s fault because of all the protections, but she still voluntells Mark to go flag him down, which seems a little unfair if you ask Mark about it. He overtips because he doesn’t really want to wait for the guy to make change with a few stray Grays being drawn to the smell of hot fresh food (and no way to yell death words at them that doesn’t make him seem crazy to a total stranger), so he books it back across the street and up the narrow steps. One of the cardboard boxes slides perilously towards the shrubbery by the door as Mark tries to shoulder it open, but he manages to get inside without any major casualties. 

Divya and Cameron have re-emerged from the attic in the time he was gone, and Mark is surprised to see Divya looking a little red and swollen around the eyes but otherwise more or less the same as usual. Cameron has a hand on his back, but his attention is mostly on Thom as they talk about something involving oars that Mark’s not even going to pretend to understand. He realizes with an unpleasant jolt that between Thom, Eduardo, and Cameron, there’s a very specific Venn Diagram that could be drawn of the Lethe Harvard Chapter boyfriend types. He’s not sure who that reflects the worst on. 

“There’s olives on both of these,” Mark points out to Eduardo. 

“You’ll survive,” he says, but he doesn’t complain when Mark picks all the olives off his slices and flicks them onto Eduardo’s plate. A long, chewing-filled silence hangs over the kitchen, the kind that always happens when people are hungrier than they’d realized and their bodies just go on survival autopilot. It’s in that silence that Divya, without any sort of prompting, pulls two pieces of pizza onto a clean plate, dabs the grease off with a napkin, and then hands them to Cameron who had been conspicuously not eating but eyeing the open boxes the way dogs with shock collars eye property lines. 

Mark sees it coming before Divya juts his chin at him, _let's talk outside_ , following him into the foyer grimly. The sudden miraculous appearance of Cameron Winklevoss might have saved Mark’s ass in the moment, but he’s not dumb enough to think it would get him off the hook completely. And while he still thinks a lot of what happened tonight _was not his fault_ , he’s at least going to try and take his dressing down with a little bit of grace given that Divya already had to go through the humiliation of sobbing all his insecurities while Mark and Eduardo looked on. 

So he’s totally braced, he’s ready, and still it completely knocks him off centre when Divya sighs, rubs his face and says, “Mark, I’m sorry.” 

“What?” Mark says intelligently. 

“I have— ” Divya’s voice wobbles and he takes a breath to steady himself. “I have not been the Virgil you deserve, and I promise that I am going to figure out how to make this right for you. If we’re going to have two more years together I don’t want you to spend the whole time resenting me. Which would be fair, honestly.” 

Mark can feel his mouth drooping open and he pulls it shut so quickly his teeth clack. “What?” 

“I knew I was Marylin’s second choice but she never made me feel like it. I _loved_ being her Dante, I want you to love being Dante. Because you’re special, Mark. And maybe you didn’t ask to be special, and maybe I didn’t ask for you, but you could be really, really good at this job.” Divya’s voice is getting a little reedier, but he keeps on steadily. “I want to be helping you get there, not holding you back.” 

“I’m— ” Mark tries. “Sorry, are you not going to like. Yell at me? At all?” 

Divya sighs. “I mean, I’m the Virgil, if you did something stupid it all links back to me. And honestly I don’t really have the energy in me tonight. I could pencil you in later this week if you’re that desperate for a dressing down.” 

“I’m good,” he says. “Oh and sorry about that, you know, Ambrosia-based meltdown.” 

“I forgive you,” Divya says. “Also I’m saying this once because on the record I need to have told you even if it makes me a hypocrite. You’re not allowed to date club members.” 

“Uh, okay?” 

Divya pats him on the shoulder. “There I did my due diligence. Do whatever you want, do _not_ let Summers find out, use more lube than you think you need.” 

Mark lets out a horrible involuntary squawking sound. “If you wanna be a better Virgil please never say the word ‘lube’ around me again.” 

“Agreed,” Divya nods. He reaches out and touches one of the gilded frames on the wall, and Mark doesn’t have to look to know which one it was. 

On the one hand if Mark never has to see Divya cry ever again it will be too soon, on the other…. “So if you’re staying, what happens with you and Cameron?” 

His eyes do get a bit shiny as he shrugs unevenly, shoulder bunching under the fabric of his sweater. “We’ll figure it out.” 

“Still, that sucks,” Mark offers weakly. 

“I can’t talk about this right now,” Divya manages out, voice a mess as his eyes well up threateningly. 

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” 

Divya exhales raggedly a few times and Mark averts his gaze as he wipes his face on the sleeve of his sweater. “I mean, we’re more on the same page than we’ve ever been, so I think. I think it’s gonna be okay.” 

He pats Mark twice tiredly on the shoulder, like a tv sitcom dad, _you don’t gotta worry about ol me._

Back in the kitchen, Cameron and Eduardo are deep in a conversation about their mutual Final Club friends, so Mark hauls himself up onto the counter beside Erica, Divya leaning up against it on his other side. She has one of her pendants hanging down by her sternum, moonstone for protection. “You two gonna be good?” 

“Yeah it’s fine Erica,” Divya says, stiff upper lip doing a lot of work. “Thank you for everything you did tonight.” 

“Well it was a great personal sacrifice to cut drinks with Mary Liz short, but since I was lacking Mark’s company I guess we’ll just have to pop by again. Maybe we can call it a Lethe corporate team building and write off our expenses.” 

“Or we could not,” Divya deadpans. 

“You know, you don’t have to be on all the time,” Erica says, tilting her head onto Mark’s shoulder. 

“Nah, that’s his whole charm,” Mark says, because he’s feeling generous since Divya apologized to him. Divya not being the best mentor was half of the story and Mark knows it, but he does feel a little bit better about his whole Lethe tenure with the knowledge that he wasn’t the only one fucking up. 

“I’m just saying ‘No Fun’ isn’t one of our rules.” 

Divya scoffs. “Yeah cause we have a great track record of following the rules.” 

Eduardo looks up at Mark then from across the room, the same way he used to catch his eye at the Kirkland dorm or an AEPi party, a silent acknowledgement of the tether between them. He knows tomorrow they’re going to have to talk about things with less kissing and more words, though hopefully still some kissing. Plus Mark is going to have to throw himself at Dustin’s mercy for blowing him off tonight. But it feels. 

It feels like something slotted back into alignment that had been knocked loose all those months ago. Like Eduardo really had reached into his chest and rearranged something only he could see. 

Maybe Mark wasn’t the only one who had a special sort of sight after all. 

“So Thom,” Mark says, turning back to the conversation at hand. “What kind of New Haven Lethe drama do you guys get up to? Make us feel better about our mess.” 

“Honestly, we’re so goddamn by the book,” Thom says with a sigh. “We never do anything fun together like this.” 

“You don’t say,” Divya adds, sounding incredibly pleased. Erica gives Mark a very sharp covert glance, even though he wasn’t going to pop Thom’s bubble either.

Let Yale live in ignorant envious bliss. 

Later, Eduardo keeps saying good night and then circling back to tell Mark _one last thing_ for a third time, hand on the middle of Mark’s upper back in a combination of fondness and posture correction. Mark promises he’ll call him in the morning, and Eduardo kisses him so thoroughly Mark isn’t sure he remembers his phone number anymore (whatever, he’ll just call the landline and throw in some Dustin grovelling while he’s at it). He hadn’t really been planning on staying up, but his mind is still processing at top speeds after everything that’s happened with Eduardo. Plus, his room being directly below Divya’s meant that he was probably going to get a make-up sex bed creaking symphony loud enough to cover whatever Thom and Erica were going to get up to acros the hall, so he just grabs his laptop off the bed and goes to the kitchen to wait it out. 

Maybe he should have brought up the imminent threat of sex eavesdropping when he’d lightly hinted at the possibility of going home with Eduardo. But he hadn’t really been disappointed when Eduardo had gently turned him down. Mark has always been uncomfortable with overly new things, but whatever’s happening between him and Eduardo isn’t a book he can break the spine of and dog ear until it feels like his. Because it’s not just something that belongs to him, and if he thinks about it too long he’s going to freak out about it. 

So instead Mark lets himself turn that part of his brain off and starts toying instead with an idea that he knows is totally going to consume his life, but would go a pretty far way in actually holding up his end with trying to be a better Dante. 

He doesn’t look up from his screen again until there’s a sudden rummaging behind him and Mark whips around on the kitchen stool, pulling his headphones off as he goes. 

“Uh, morning,” Cameron says sheepishly, having pulled Erica’s blender out from one of the cupboards beside the sink. “I said hello but I guess you didn’t hear me.” 

Mark squints at him. “What time is it?” 

“About 5:30,” Cameron says, casually. Like this is a normal time in the morning to be awake if you actually went to bed. 

“What are you doing with that?” 

“Oh I thought. Smoothie? If that’s alright.” 

Mark turns back to his screen. “We don’t use that blender for food.” 

“Ah,” Cameron says, with the gentle inflection of etiquette lessons. “Noted.” 

There’s some more scrambling as Cameron presumably puts the very not-food-safe blender back where he found it, and Mark feels more than sees Cameron come up behind him and peer at the screen over his shoulder. He resists the urge to put his hands over the screen like he used to in high school when his sisters would pester him. 

“What are you working on?” 

“I’m experimenting with esolangs to design a Lethe database. If the obscurity of the code can function as a form of encryption, then maybe all these dumb magically encrypted records we have will actually let me digitize them,” Mark says, because years of people leaning over his shoulder have taught him that the most direct line to get them to stop bothering him was to describe what he was doing with no additional explanation. He’s expecting Cameron to pull away, maybe laugh awkwardly and go back to his rummaging, but he just leans closer, smelling suspiciously like Divya’s aftershave. 

“Huh,” he says, more to himself than Mark. “Is that— are you using _Malbolge_?” The surprise must be all over his face and Cameron grins with a halfhearted shrug, “I did a decent amount of coding in high school. Actually considered majoring in CS but it would have been too much with crew.” 

“Sure,” Mark agrees. He’d mostly given up fencing for his course load, and on any other day he’d probably judge Cameron for making the inferior choice, but he’s in a charitable enough mood to overlook it. 

“So you’re hoping for what? Obscurity as security?” 

“I mean if I can get it on its feet I’ll get some actual encryption algorithms involved.” 

“Right, right,” Cameron nods. “You’re a brave man to attempt it in Malbolge, but I guess it’s pretty appropriate.” 

“Hmm?” 

Cameron leans back finally, “Like Dante’s Inferno? Malbolge is one of the circles of hell.” 

“Haven’t read it,” Mark says with a shrug. He has an uncracked copy sitting on his bookshelf, and even his newfound sense of duty towards Lethe isn’t going to change that anytime soon. Virgil leads Dante into hell and he lived that experience, what else does he need to know? 

“I’m pretty sure Divya hasn’t either,” Cameron says, with so much fondness in his voice it’s not remotely a criticism. “He never picks up my references.” 

Mark pulls his headphones the rest of the way off. “It sucks that you guys can’t like— go public or whatever for another two years.” 

“Actually,” Cameron says, conspiratorially, “I have an idea I’d like to talk to you about. You got a minute?” 

Mark squints at his half finished line of code as Cam settles himself against the counter, trying to be cavallier in the same way his request was, even as the wood groans at the bulk of him. In another lifetime Mark would probably hate him for that. But it’s hard not to wonder what it must be like to be someone who can detach himself from the physical plane and have to make the choice every second to keep carrying it. 

Maybe it’s selfish but it makes Mark think of Eduardo. The way his life would be undeniably easier if he’d just walked away from him at the clubhouse, sloughed off the cocoon of his old life and never looked back. 

“Yeah,” Mark says, “I got a minute.” 

“You’re late,” Divya says, before Mark’s even all the way into the president’s office. 

“How can I be late, I came as soon as you called me,” Mark says, slinging his backpack off and getting a very dirty look from President Summers’ receptionist when the probably-heirloom chair he threw his bag onto squawks in protest. He’d been enjoying a perfectly nice lunch with Eduardo — which had mostly consisted of Mark plowing through a taco salad while Eduardo nursed a comically small takeout coffee and complained about his new pre-med classes — when he’d gotten the call that Summers wanted to talk to him. Apparently Divya and the twins’ tag team sales pitch hadn’t been convincing enough on its own to get Divya off the grad school hook. Though Mark’s not exactly sure what his point of view is going to add to this conversation that hasn’t already been said. 

“Div, relax,” Tyler says, even as his own brother looks about to throw up all over his polished leather dress shoes. 

Divya rubs at his nose and sniffs, but he also doesn’t argue back, and Tyler gives Mark a little _you know how he is_ eyeroll. Mark’s still not sure if he actually likes Tyler Winklevoss, but Tyler seems to think the two of them are brothers in arms because of their shared Cameron and Divya experience. And really, who is Mark to deny him his natural jock instincts to pick teams? 

“I’m sure you all don’t need to stay,” Summers receptionist says as a not-suggestion, and Divya darts one only half-veiled helpless glance at Mark before Tyler manages to get both him and Cameron swept out of the waiting area. 

“We’ll be outside,” Divya throws over his shoulder for good measure, and Mark hopes the sidewalk in front of Mass Hall has been reinforced before Divya wears a rut into it with his restless pacing. 

“Well, don’t keep him waiting,” the receptionist says, and then flicks her wrist at him like he’s a feral cat that needs to be shooed away. 

Summers’ office is high ceilinged and impressive looking, even for Harvard, and the lonely outline of a single Gray drifts past him back out into the waiting area, as if repelled by the vacuum of emotion engulfing the space. It’s not that Mark doesn’t care exactly, he doesn’t want Divya hanging around over his shoulder for two more years any more than Divya does, but getting emotional about it isn’t going to help anyone. 

“Ahh, Mr. Zuckerberg,” Summers says nonchalantly, two identical contracts for two identical boys pushed to the edge of his desk. 

“Hi,” Mark says, hesitating because he’s not sure if he should sit and he doesn’t really want to sit either. Summers’ eyes flicker up at him judgmentally, but he doesn’t say anything about it. 

“This is a rather unusual situation we find ourselves in.” 

“Yes sir,” Mark parrots, because he’s overheard Divya on the phone enough to know that Summers likes an ego boost or twelve. 

“On paper it’s an excellent compromise. Mr. Narendra will stay in the area to consult as an alum but will graduate from his Virgil duties while Mr. Winklevoss and Mr. Winklevoss agree to pursue their Masters degrees here and continue overseeing the Porcellian rites.” 

“It’s the most dangerous rite,” Mark offers, which is true. “That’s the only one I’m really concerned about,” which is not. But that’s splitting hairs, and the Porcellian has had way more casualties than the Phoenix. That’s the one Summers and everyone on Lethe board is concerned about, especially with two fatalities in recent memory. 

“Hmm,” Summers flicks through one of the contracts. “And you feel...comfortable with this arrangement?” 

Mark shrugs, “Sure,” and after a moment, “did you need me to elaborate?” 

“I suppose not.” Summers puts the papers down. “Like I said, on paper there’s very little to complain about.” 

“Not on paper?” 

A sharp silence pulls taunt between us and Mark can feel the clock behind him ticking in his molars.

“The balance between Lethe and the clubs is a delicate one, Mr Zuckerberg.” 

“So I’ve been told.” 

“Well I’m sure then you can appreciate where my mind goes when I see two young club members with promising futures chomping at the bit to backburner their lives for a few years. And perhaps more concerningly, where the Alumni’s minds might go if they suspected some sort of coercion.” 

It takes a second for it to hit Mark, and then it’s a show of self restraint to laugh in Summers’ face. “You think he’s _blackmailing them_?” 

“Could he be?” 

Mark snorts. “Do I think Divya Narendra blackmailed the Winklevoss twins into getting Masters degrees? No, I don’t.” 

Admittedly though, that would have been a lot cooler than Cameron making puppy dog eyes at him and begging him to _think about it_ so he and Divya didn’t have to spend an additional two years stuck in relationship purgatory. Dating a club member still wasn’t exactly Lethe best practices, but according to Divya there was at least some precedent that once graduated, Lethe board didn’t seem particularly concerned with the romantic entanglements of their alums. 

“Look I know you think I’m not really cut out for this job, and if I couldn’t see Grays I’d never be standing here in a million years,” Mark hears himself saying, even though his whole plan was keeping his mouth shut and not saying anything. “But this whole arrangement is Divya daring me to do better, and I know you don’t know me that well _sir,_ but I think we can both agree that I don’t back down from a challenge.” 

“Plus,” Mark continues, “I really don’t think the clubs are going to notice. If anything, the only people talking would be the other Ivies if Harvard needs to double dip their Virgils twice in a row.”

Summers’ face pinches, his middle finger tapping against his thumb aggressively. Mark knows that expression well, it’s the face people make when they know he’s made a good point and aren’t happy about it. Mark knows Summers isn’t stupid, he knows what Mark is doing as much as Mark does himself. But he’s also right, the other Ivies _will_ talk, falling all over themselves for any chance to try and knock Harvard down a peg. Mark may have only been Dante for a few months, but that much was crystal clear from the moment they brought him on board. 

No one ends up working for Lethe who isn’t absolutely desperate to win. 

“Well if you have no concerns then,” Summers says tightly. “I was perhaps a bit hasty in my own assessment of your abilities, given your _unique circumstance_.” 

Mark gives a half-hearted shrug. “Nobody’s perfect.” 

He can practically feel the phantom pain of where Divya would have smacked him upside the head for that remark, but Summers just gives him a wry look and waves a hand. “You’re dismissed, Dante. Don’t let me see you here again.” 

Mark manages to hold back his eye roll until his back is to Summers, which feels like a real testament to Divya’s relentless hammering home of a Lethe officer’s greatest strength being tact. This is of course then immediately tested when Mark checks his phone and has a new text from Eduardo that says; _Can you please explain to me why your Oculus just gave me a blood withdrawal kit?_

 _i told you_ , Mark texts back one handed, _sex blood magic_. 

_That was REAL!?_

_Mark I thought you made that up_

_ill explain later_ , Mark texts back as he shoulders open the door out of Mass Hall. 

_Mark_

_arent u in class rn_

_Technically_

_Look I’m not saying NO_

_I just have questions_

_dont we all_

_ill explain when i pick u up_

_gtg x_ , he types before Eduardo can protest further. He almost doesn’t spot Divya at first, looking for his bodyguards on instinct, so Mark’s surprised to spot him sitting on a nearby bench with Erica, drinking a takeout coffee with a kind of forced nonchalance. Erica has a pink bakery box open between them, the hot sugary smell drawing the attention of a nearby Gray. 

“Where are the twins?” Mark asks, shoving his phone into his hoodie pocket with one hand and flicking some graveyard dirt at the Gray with the other. He’s taken to carrying some with him now that he and Eduardo are actually going places together again, Grays have always been drawn to Eduardo, and it’s even worse now that he’s dragging Mark down into his lovesickness. 

“Ahhh, careful, don’t get it on the pastries,” Erica says, shielding the box with her body like a mother protecting its young. 

Divya pushes his hair off his forehead. “I sent the twins off to the tank, they’re like dogs who haven’t been walked when they’re anxious and it was stressing me out. So?” 

“So?” 

“What did Summers say?” 

Right. Duh. 

“Well he definitely thinks you know where they hid a dead body or something, but I guess he’s more willing to gamble Lethe’s rep on it than have two Virgils in a row overstay their welcome and have Yale write mean things about us on their bathroom stalls.” 

“Thom would never let that happen,” Erica says around an obnoxious mouthful of apple fritter. 

“He really went for it?” Divya says, the hopefulness in his voice coming untucked like the corner of a fitted sheet. Not quite ready to believe it. Mark doesn’t tend to notice those kinds of things, but it’s easier when he’s been walking around in his own state of hopeful disbelief all week. 

“I think as long as I don’t fuck up too badly— ” 

“ —And you won’t,” Divya says firmly. 

“ —Then yeah it should all be fine for the Winklevossen to take over.” 

“Great. Cool, I’ll tell them then,” Divya says, and his voice wobbles in the middle like the disastrous time Dustin tried to make quiche for the girl on their floor he was in love with. Mark feels pretty certain that this is going to end a lot better for all parties involved than the Infamous Quiche Seduction (and subsequent food poisoning) of ‘02. 

“Hey speaking of boyfriends,” Mark says, continuing over Divya’s squawk because he still has a primal aversion to the B word. “Don’t traumatize mine with sex blood magic, you have a perfectly good willing specimen of your own.” 

“He’s not allowed to be squeamish, I know what he does for fun,” Erica retorts. “Plus, Thom’s blood wouldn’t be as effective as yours anyways, you’re special.” 

“That’s what my mom always told me,” Mark says, digging out a donut for himself and begrudgingly letting Erica press a glaze covered kiss to his cheek. 

“I meant because you have the sight, Mark.” 

“That too.” 

Erica tips her head back. “You don’t have to do it.” 

“Maybe for our six month anniversary or something,” Mark says, licking a stray sprinkle off his thumb. “Don’t wanna scare him away.” 

Though Erica’s right, it’s not like he has much of a leg to stand on here. It’s more that if Mark thinks about Eduardo and sex, even sex for weird blood magic reasons, more than strictly necessary he’s going to slip into a spiral of which the only escape is a really good orgasm. 

“I guess I should— I mean I should go tell them, right?” Divya says suddenly, clearly not having listened to any of what they were just talking about. “I didn’t really. I hadn’t thought through getting this far.” 

“I have to get to class,” Erica says, adjusting the little yarn pancake of a hat she’s slapped on over her hair. “But you can take these if you want them.” 

She holds out the half-full box of donuts, but Divya waves her off. “Tyler doesn’t really like sweet things, and Cam will overcompensate for that fact and make himself sick.” 

“I’ll take them,” Mark offers, he’s heading over to Dustin’s after this, and food always goes a long way for making up for a multitude of his sins. 

“Cool,” Erica says, handing them off and adjusting the strap of her bag. “Div, I know it’s awesome that this worked but. I am kind of sad it’s only going to be the three of us until the end of the year. I think we make a pretty alright team.” 

“Please,” Divya says. “I’m gonna be dropping in all the time to make sure you haven’t burnt the house down.” But he accepts Erica’s hug wholeheartedly. “Besides, you’ve still got a semester and a half to get sick of me.” 

“Oh don’t worry,” Erica tosses over her shoulder as she goes, dry leaves swirling around her boots in the November wind. “I’m already sick to death of both of you.” 

Mark snorts, suddenly gaining awareness that he’s been grinning for the last several minutes without consciously registering it. 

“See you back at Lethe?” Divya offers. 

“Oh, actually,” Mark says. Eduardo has class for another forty-five minutes and he doesn’t exactly have anywhere else to be. “Maybe I’ll come with? I mean me and the Doublemint twins are kind of in this thing together for the long haul, right?” 

“Right,” Divya agrees, this time not even trying to hide how pleased he is. “Well, in that case...” 

“Lead on Virgil,” Mark says, and follows. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly a hug thank you to youshallnotfinditso who, on top of the usual cheerleading and beta skills, originated the whole idea of this au and got me to read Ninth House in the first place. I cannot thank you enough, you're amazing.  
> Secondly to evol_love who's beta was absolutely instrumental in making sure this fic was approachable for the non-Ninth House reader and who liveblogged your incredible reaction to every plot twist, thank you so much.  
> Thirdly to firstlovelatespring who helped me sound like I vaguely knew what I was talking about when it came to coding, you're great, thanks for your help. 
> 
> Lastly a thank you to you reader for reading! It means a lot that people take the time out of their lives to come along for the ride. I'd love to hear what you thought and you can also find me on tumblr where I'm phonecallfromgod.


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